


Áłtsé Hashké's School for Ne'er-Do-Wells and Insufferable Bastards

by Chronolith



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Coyote is a monster god, Gen, I know where I'm going, I swear I understand basketball rules, Japanese Mythology - Freeform, Magical Realism, Native American Mythology - Freeform, Shamanism, Slow Build, but imma break and/or ignore them for dramatic effect, but it's gonna take a while, that is a thing I think we should all remember
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-04-06 03:54:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 46,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4206984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sometimes<br/>this middle of the road business<br/>is hard to take."</p><p>--"Hard to Take" by Luci Tapahonso</p><p>Or that AU where everything is exactly the same except for the fact that Kagami is an urban Shaman and the MiraGen are all possessed by one thing or another. Kagami would like to lodge a complaint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pretty Picture, But The Scenery Is So Loud

**Then**

“So you are really going, _atsilì_?” 

Taiga didn’t bother to look up, but he couldn't stop the automatic hunch of his shoulders. It'd only been a matter of time before this conversation rolled around. He'd tried to put it off for as long as possible by avoiding all Coyote's regular haunts. He'd even gone so far as to start running on the treadmill, which was just a thing of pain and despair, rather than through Griffith Park. 

“Get down from there, Coyote. People'll get nervous,” he said, flapping one hand over his shoulder at the elder god perched on his windowsill. He shoved a box into a corner with its brothers before turning around. 

“Hahaha haaa, like they can even see me,” came Coyote’s easy reply, though Taiga did note that he hopped through the open window and began nosing through Taiga’s room, snuffling at the boxes and pawing at his bags.

“They can see coyotes well enough, and Ms. Finklestein'll start fussing about her precious bichon if she sees you again,” Taiga argued absently as he ran through his mental to-do list. He had most of his bags in order (assuming they would stay that way given his current guest’s mercurial temper) and the movers were scheduled for later in the week for all the heavy stuff, which sat wrapped in packing papers and bubble wrap.

“Haaa haha, I could eat the little thing for you?” his guest offered, sitting neatly, tail wrapped around his fore-paws. “Think of it as a little parting gift.”

Taiga cocked his head, considering the option before good sense kicked in. He hated that little thing with the passion of a thousand suns—too many morning runs interrupted by a fluffy ball of hate and rage barking what were, he was sure, obscenities in dog. Setting his jaw firmly, he regretfully set the option aside. Gifts involving blood and death from deities—particularly deities dedicated to chaos— probably wasn't the most auspicious way of returning to Japan. “Nah. More trouble than it’s worth.”

“I should give you some sort of gift,” Coyote replied, drawing out the vowels of his words, practically crooning them.

That made Taiga pause in his packing to eye Coyote suspiciously. On the one hand most of Coyote’s gifts tended to have strings attached, or blow up in his face (literally), or otherwise cause problems. On the other hand denying Coyote never got him anything but more trouble. And every once in a while those gifts came in handy. He could feel his mouth twisting to one side. There was no good way out of this.

Coyote favored him with a toothy grin.

He plopped himself cross-legged in front of Coyote and stared at him. Coyote stared back. Taiga knew that this could go all day if he let it. (Or Coyote would decide to stop time and do one his weird reality warping dream things, which were always deeply unsettling.) He heaved a sigh that he felt originated somewhere in his toes. 

“Nothin' that blows up, eats people, or can 'cut the bones of the earth',” he said as he ticked each condition off on a finger, making finger quotes around the last one. That made his guest cackle—a ringing, yipping sound that dragged down Taiga's spine like icy fingers. 

“I have already given you one of my teeth! And I see you wear it next to your fake-brother’s little ring,” Coyote said with one dainty paw rising to tap it.

Taiga grabbed at his necklace, hidden under his shirt, and glared at Coyote. “Stop bad-mouthin' Tatsuya.”

“Pfffft, I would ask my brother to be more brotherly, eh, _atsilì_?” Coyote stalked a circle around Taiga and then rubbed his face along Taiga’s, more like a cat than a canine. Taiga didn't flinch, just tried to side-eye Coyote so hard it gave him a mild headache. Which only made Coyote cackle more. “But no more of that. Today I came to give my favorite shaman a gift!”

Taiga opened his mouth to deny ever becoming shaman and then closed it with a sigh. “Thank you?”

“Ahahaha, _atsilì_ , so distrustful! When have I ever not guided you with the gentle hand of a loving brother?” Taiga desperately wanted to say always, you are always a walking disaster, but he kept his mouth shut. Coyote chuckled again like he could see the inside of Taiga's head and rubbed his cheek along the other side of Taiga's face. His fur smelled like agave and cactus water, felt like satin against Taiga's skin. “I give you this.”

A thick sheaf of tightly wrapped leaves dropped in his lap. They smelled of desert heat and clean water. “White sage?”

“Purified white sage! Something to chase out those little weak ones while you are on your own!”

Taiga shot Coyote a sidelong glance. “You aren’t going to follow?”

Coyote’s tail snapped out and down, before curling back around his fore-paws. “I dislike getting my paws wet.”

Which Taiga interpreted to mean that the Pacific Ocean was too big a thing for even Coyote to cross. He picked up the sage and took a deep breath. The power tingled through him like he'd touched his tongue to the top of a battery. “Thank you.”

Coyote dropped his head on Taiga’s shoulder–a solid, heavy weight–as the god eyed him. “You’ve been entertaining these years, eh? Teaching you all the things a good shaman should know? A little gift for the amusement.”

Something twanged painfully under Taiga's ribs. He rubbed Coyote’s ears until he leaned against Taiga’s hand. “I’ll be back, you know.”

“Enh, see that you are. Shamans are rare among you short-lived creatures these days. Don’t let the weak, little demons on that tiny pathetic island eat you, eh?”

“I won’t.” After all, Taiga thought, how much worse could anything in Japan be compared to the lord of tricksters?

**Now**

The answer to 'how much worse could things be?' is, of course, so much worse. One day, Taiga thinks ruefully, he's gonna to learn to not ask rhetorical questions that the universe delighted in answer in the most painful ways possible. 

It's the difference in scale, he decides idly as the afternoon sun trickles through the trees, that really got to him.

America's a land that thrums with power—both old and new—and gods walking the highways while demons dance on the cross roads, but weird shit spread itself across the entire damned continent. A person can go weeks, maybe months, before bumping into something preternatural. Of course, that preternatural something is probably inclined to eat your head and hoard your soul, but you can spot them—and all that flashy power—like a storm on the horizon and make appropriate plans. 

Japan, on the other hand, is a land where spirits and ghosts press in close, following the same daily grind as businessmen, housewives, and students. They blend into the background, as much a part of Tokyo as the udon stands and ridiculous traffic. Taiga had needed to reset his internal radar for weird shit to a much lower level after the first week of being constantly startled, because while there aren't any enormous fucking monsters like Coyote just wandering around, there are little ayakashi goddamned everywhere.

Taiga no longer jumps when the person he ends up smashed against on the train has a weeping wound, or missing a head, or—on one memorable occasion—is just a massive mountain of fur. He slaps away the grasping hand of the _akaketo_ when he walks under ginko trees. He keeps an extra water bottle for that one dumb _kappa_ that never seems to remember that his head will dry out on the hot days in Yoyogi Park. He buys towels and bedclothes from the _jorogumo_ who sits out at the open market on Sundays. And, in general, he's learned that the preternatural in Japan are just trying to make a living like everyone else.

It had taken a little while, but he thinks he's finally hit equilibrium. Enough of a sense of calm that he can take naps in the ancient old oaks on his middle school campus and not even flinch when Te-no-me clambers into his tree.

“This school, eh? Eh?” comes Te-no-me's rumbling voice, invading his peaceful afternoon nap. 

Taiga grinds one shoulder against the bark to try to relieve an itch there before popping one eye to obligingly study the shiny brochures for some new academy that featured an impressive array of amenities and extracurricular activities that were distinctly martial. The school's marketing team seemed confused as to whether they were trying to sell an education or a theme park. The headmaster's eyes track Taiga from the laminated paper. He shudders. Then shakes his head.

“Bah. Bah. Young people. You never know what you want,” grouches Te-no-me as he settles onto a closer branch, brochures in all four of his hands. He offers another one, only slightly crumpled—a shoe print mars the cheerful picture. “This one? Eh? Eeeeeh?”

Taiga stops paying attention as the horizon in the far east suddenly goes dark with a burgeoning storm. Taiga pulls himself higher into the tree, ignoring how it scatters all of Te-no-me's carefully scavenged brochures, to peer at it suspiciously. The old ayakashi squawks with offended dignity. 

“Goin' to Seiren,” he calls down absently.

Te-no-me's objections are both deafening and incoherent. Taiga tunes out somewhere around the third iteration of “not developing your talents” in favor of studying the horizon with all his 'other' senses opened to the world. He's found himself doing that a lot in recent months. 

As Te-no-me rants, Taiga shuffles around the upper branches, carefully sliding one foot in front of the other, to find a good observation point. As if in response to his observation, the cloud pulls in on itself—long, black tendrils slithering through the sky—and then vanishes.

Frowning thoughtfully, Taiga drops back down to the branch where Te-no-me perches, all four of his hands clenched tight in frustration.

“It's the closest to my apartment,” he tells Te-no-me as he continues to clamber down the tree. 

“Bah,” the wizened old ghost shouts down after him. “Bah! No one there! Nothing there! It's just a blank slate.”

“Yeah?” he replies once he got to the bottom. Shoving his hands into his pockets he waits for the old man unclench his fists long enough actually look at him. “So it's normal?”

“Bah. Nothing's normal. You know that,” came the faint response, but Te-no-me drops out the tree, apparently content to follow along after him, grumbling and muttering along the way. 

“It's nice to pretend sometimes,” he says under his breath as he makes his way to the shoe lockers. “Normal would be nice.”

The girl next to him shoots him a questioning glance and he shrugs one shoulder at her in response as he opens his shoe locker. She's still there when he closes it, looking a little pink around the cheeks and doing the finger thing—pressing the tips of her fingers together and periodically flexing them. She doesn't meet his eyes.

Oh damn. Here they go again.

“Um,” she tries.

“I was just thinking about what to make for dinner out loud,” he says, cutting her off. “I'm hoping it'll turn out normal this time.”

“Oh.” He tries not to feel bad about the disappointed sag of her shoulders. God damn this talking-to-creatures-other-people-couldn't-see thing, normal people get the weirdest ideas. “So you cook?”

He's pretty impressed at her rally, honestly. The way she stands her ground in front of his obvious attempt to shut her down. That's probably why he says, “Yeah, my dad's not around much so it's just me,” before his brain catches up with his mouth.

“I could, if you wanted,” she murmurs, pink tinge coming back with a vengeance, “lend you some of my cook books?”

That derails him. He blinks at her. She flushes harder but maintains firm eye contact. “Yeeaaaah. Sure. That would be helpful. I'm not real good with making Japanese dishes yet. ”

Mentally, he slaps himself. That's the sort of opening that girls jumped on. His apartment isn't a place he wants to take other people. Explanations always got … strange. But she looks so pleased that he can't really regret it. 

“I could bring them tomorrow? And you could make copies?” she asks. “Since we all graduate middle school tomorrow.”

He's kinda forgotten about that. He glances back around the emptying entryway—boys slapping each other on the back, girls grabbing each others' hands. “Huh, yeah that'd work. I'd forgotten that tomorrow is our last day.”

She joins him for a moment in watching the commotion. “It will be a little sad, but I'm ready to start high school. New things. New people. New relationships.”

God dammit. He knows that under the eyelashes look. Time to derail. “What school didya pick?”

“Kaijo.” Is she going pink again? Oh yeah, that's some blush creeping up her cheeks. “It's, um, it's very good. A lot of really, um, interesting people go there.”

Definitely a blush. Even the tips of her ears are turning pink as he watches. Fucked if he could figure out why though. “Yeah, I didn't really look at stuff like that when I picked. Seiren. It's just the closest.”

“Oh,” she says with a disappointed little sigh. Wait what? Why did that get the disappointed sigh? He rubs at the back of his neck as she squares her shoulders and gives him a brave little smile. “What is her name?”

What. The. Fuck. His expression gives him away because that brave little smile slides into confusion, then calculation, and then she tips back her head to study him. 

“You know,” she says in a matter-of-fact tone. And where the hell did all the blushing from a minute go? “When people say that they are going to a particular school because 'it's the closest' they normally mean that there's someone there that they like.”

Taiga's pretty sure he boggles for a moment. He takes a second to get his face back together before replying: “Uh. No. Really just because it's the closest and … yeah, no.”

She gives him speculative look for a little bit and then grins—the corners of her smile turning sharp. “Well. I hope she's pretty.”

God damn it and the mind of Japanese females. He watches as she slips out the door and is promptly mobbed by all her friends who periodically turn to study him. Or giggle. Or study him and giggle at the same time.

“Is there a girl?” Te-no-me wants to know and Taiga only just manages to not jump a solid foot. He closes his eyes and counts to ten. 

“No,” he hisses under his breath as he pretends to retie his shoes. “It's really just the closest.”

He hoists his bag over his shoulder and marches towards the gates, ignoring both the wave of giggling following after him and Te-no-me's demands to know who this girl is and how pretty is she really if she got him to go to some no name school like Seiren.

It really is just the closest. God dammit.

He continues to ignore Te-no-me's increasingly loud demands to tell him the 'mystery girl's name' and stalks down to the mostly empty street court in the warren that is Ikebukero. His step gets lighter the closer he gets to welcoming blacktop—less a furious stormtrooper's march and more the slightly bouncy gait of a delighted teenaged boy.

Taiga slings his bag onto a bench, quickly followed by his uniform jacket, the second he clears the rusting chain-link fence. The thud and scrap of shoes, the rattle of the chain hoop as the ball slams through it, and that particular laughter boys got when they had too much testosterone and not enough sense make him smile. He raises one hand over his shoulder absently as Te-no-me grumbles and grouches his way into a comfortable position on the bench. 

“Hello! Kagami?” comes one entirely too pleased with itself voice.

“Taiga, play with us?” comes the other voice that's never far behind.

Taiga quirks a brow at the pair of _yako_ brothers with their toothy smiles and predatory eyes. As one unit they lean into him. He refuses to step back as they come within inches of his face. They spend several seconds breathing in one another's breath. Their grins going wide and a little feral as he stands his ground. 

“We should play a game,” says one.

“We should _bet_ on the game,” says the other. 

Taiga eyes both of them. They give him identical grins that slide so far around their pointy little faces that he's sure those shark-like smirks meet up behind their heads like one long continuous zipper. He holds up one finger and they both lean back, preparing to look pleasantly smug. “Two games. One-on-one. Loser buys dinner.”

That earns him identical wails of outrage that make Taiga swallow a smile. Correct method of dealing with _yako_ identified. Crossing his arms—and swaying occasionally out of the way of flailing limbs—he settles down to wait until the protests solidify around a single complaint.

“... and you only need to win once,” says one. 

“But we need to win both times,” says the other.

“If you aren't up for it, we can always play an easier game,” Taiga replies, widening his eyes at them. He spreads his hands in mockingly conciliatory gesture. “I wouldn't want to be mean.”

The twins look at each other, then turn identical scowls onto him. “You think that you are,” starts one.

“--very clever---” says the other. Taiga bites down on the inside of his cheek.

“--but you are not very clever---” Bites down until it nearly bleeds.

“And we are going to win both times,” the twins finish with a ringing triumphant air.

“Sure, sure.” He grins and can feel the corners of it curl. Coyote's grin on his mouth. “Prove it.”

The games themselves are a fast-pace dance of sneaky moves and on-the-fly exorcism techniques. 

One brother uses fox-fire to try to shake his hold on the ball, making it glow with a blue light under his fingers as he dribbles. Taiga swipes his hand across Coyote's tooth, strung with leather to his necklace, and thinks of sand, heat, and the smell of rain on the high desert. The blue fire flickers and dies as he drives forward to dunk over his opponent's head. 

His opponent shakes his head, tossing his pale hair wildly, and stomps off the court with his shoulders tight and his head down while his brother moves onto it with the slithering grace of an eel in a reef. 

There's an uncomfortable moment when the little _yako_ makes him think there's suddenly hundreds of him on the court, each moving with unpredictable ease and sharp eyes, before Taiga puts two fingers against his own eyes and drags his fingers down and off his face—physically moving the illusion off himself with the gesture. Then he steals the ball from the _yako_ 's surprised grip and shoots it from the free throw line. 

It bounces off the hoop, hitting it with enough force to set the chain net rattling, and they both dive for it. The _yako_ gets it first, but spends too long standing there with a thoughtful (maliciously so) expression. Taiga slides in behind him and scoops up the ball before driving hard for the net. One lay-up later and he's smirking at the pair who glower back at him.

“Fine,” says one, lips twisting down over alarmingly sharp canines.

“We will pay for dinner,” says the other as he folds his arms. “But you had best like udon.”

“That's fine,” Taiga replies as he collects his jacket and bag from Te-no-me, who manages to both clap for his victories and hand him his things at the same time. Benefits of having hands for eyes, Taiga supposes. 

He stands idly swinging his bag as the _yako_ brothers bicker about who would pay for the bill. (Taiga kinda wants to laugh because he knows that if they pay at all, it'll be with illusionary gold.) Really, basketball is basketball—same rhythm and dance, same tempo that beats under his skin—no matter where in the world he is. 

The boys slink up to stand beside him, flanking him like a pair of pale-haired, smirking honor guards. They heave identical sighs, and study him from beneath their eyelashes. Taiga tries to frown at them both and then gives it up as an impossible job. They snicker at each other around him before turning to regard him again.

“Nothing for it,” they tell him. “It'll have to be the udon stand.”

“That's fine,” Taiga says again. He could feel their eyes range over him. One cocks his head to the left while the other cocks his head to the right.

“You are being very agreeable,” remarks one.

“It is a little alarming,” says the other, more to his brother than to Taiga. 

He shrugs and refuses to give more than that. Given all the worries piling up inside his head, Taiga finds it hard to find the energy to play word games with the brothers. Being distracted always makes him agreeable. Several explanations offer themselves inside his head. He starts high school soon. That's a worry. He wonders about playing basketball with just normal humans would be like—would it be too easy? Would be harder? Would there be _ayakashi_ at Seiren? Would they be a problem? And he rejects all of them as worries his accompanying _ayakashi_ wouldn't understand. 

“Just hungry,” he says instead of all of those piling worries. Those can keep. 

Taiga breathes out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding when the pair of _yako_ only glance at each other and then shrug. The pair bicker with each other around him as they make their way down the alley and out onto main street. The late afternoon sun drug itself down the horizon, turning the entire road into a path of red-gold cobblestones. 

He pauses for a second as he studies the pretty picture the street makes with lights slowly coming on in the shops and the street gleaming. Then he turns back to the boys who favor him with lovely smiles. Sweet like summer strawberries. Their eyes only slightly glittering with mischievous light.

“Nope,” he tells the twins, folding his arms.

“It really is the best udon,” says one.

“And it's not like you even miss the time,” encourages the other.

“Nope,” he repeats, making the 'p' on the nope pop. 

The boys link their arms through his, hanging off him like they really would drop to the ground if he let them, and sigh as if it was the last breath leaving their scrawny bodies. The street slowly loses its picturesque quality. Red-gold stones fade to dingy gray, shops lose that ethereal light. 

“You really are absolutely no fun,” they grouch at him. Taiga notices that passersby still move around them like water, opening a channel for them in the crowd, but that's convenient so he doesn't comment. They keep their arms linked companionably through his, leaning around his body to exchange catty comments about their fellow pedestrians. Their presence is a warm, heavy weight against his sides and a cool breeze dries the sweat in his hair. If he's smilingly slightly, the _yako_ brothers generously say nothing. 

They still manage to con him into sitting at a udon stand run by _myoubu_ who heaps cured vegetables onto their plates. Taiga twirls his chopsticks in his right hand, listening with half an ear to the argument amongst the three foxes about whether or not the two boys really did need to eat more vegetables given that they were all _youkai_. Then he filches a bit of fish off the nearest plate. 

–

Maybe it's the comfortable afternoon and evening spent in the company of a variety of foxes that puts him in such a nostalgic mood. Or it's just time and distance blunting memories, but a bit of homesickness twists around his chest as he lays spread out across his futon later that night.

He breathes in the quiet of empty apartment as he listens to the soft, distant sounds of Tokyo. It's a remarkably polite city, settling down in the evenings to pleasant white noise, and he wonders how that works as he slowly relaxes into his futon. But even with the sounds of the city providing the gentle soundtrack for sleep he finds himself shifting from side to side until he finally sits up.

Taiga frowns into the gentle darkness and then scrubs his hands across his face. He takes a deep breath, tasting the still air like it holds secrets, and then scowls. The air tastes flat across his tongue and hangs heavy on his skin. Dragging himself out of bed with jerky movements he staggers to his desk to rummage around.

Tossing half used notebooks and pens to one side, he digs through his drawers, making a mess that'll be annoying in the morning. He curses softly when rummaging around in his desk just earns him one injured hand, stabbed by a pencil he'd forgotten in a bottom drawer, but not anything he wants. He scans his room and then grins when his gaze hits his closet. Walking to his closet on his knees and then drags out boxes, bags, and various piles of detritus of his middle school life. Taiga tosses them to one side until he finds the little bundle of leaves bound in their white thread and felt cloth. 

He rummages through mess he's made of his closet until he finds a lighter, dragged all the way from LA, and carefully sets the leaves smoking. He staggers to his feet, tripping slightly over the mess now littering his floor, and gently waves the leaves four times to his forehead, deeply inhaling the trailing smoke. Watching his feet, Taiga directs the smoke first to the north, then the west, then to the east, then to the south before waving it four times to his head once again. 

The smoke curls around the room like it's exploring. It slowly diffuses in to the air, leaving a slight gray mist that smells of sage, desert heat, and home. Taiga carefully damps the leaves and wraps them again in their cloth. Then he kneels in the middle of the room to just breathe in that nostalgic scent, letting it seep into him through his lungs. 

After he's sat there kneeling in the middle of his room long enough for his knees to start protesting, Taiga drags himself back to his futon and drops into sleep like a rock into deep, dark water.

“ _Atsilì_! It had been so long that I had begun to wonder if you had forgotten your old teacher!”

Taiga's entire body jerks upright like someone had applied an electric shock right to the most sensitive areas of his body. And then stumbles across the sand until he fetches up against the rock outcropping upon which Coyote lounges, regarding him with open delight.

Slowly looking around he finds only empty desert with a gentle breeze making strange designs in the sand. The breeze pauses for a moment, as if it noticed it's being watched, and then begins to trace scrawling signs, like kanji characters written by a demented hand. Taiga snaps his gaze back to Coyote rather than look at writing forming on the golden desert floor. 

Coyote's joyful smile is still a nightmare of too many teeth stretched too far across his furry head. But Taiga still lifts his hands rub along Coyote's jaw when he brings that massive head down to Taiga's level. He stands his ground against Coyote's heavy breath even though it threatens to either bowl him along the desert or drop him to his knees with its smell. 

“I though I would save the sage until I needed it,” he says by way of an apology.

Coyote's laugh is still a horror of scratchy yips that drags icy fingers down Taiga's spine. “Aaahhh,” the elder god sighs, sending a massive wave of fetid breath over Taiga, “I would not give so stingy a gift that you would need to be so careful.”

Taiga feels his face move in strange ways until he could get it back under control. “Thank you?”

“Ahahaha, still so distrustful!” Coyote cackles. He rears back his head until it blots out the moon, lifting his snout to the stars in his laughter. “This is a thing I have missed!”

Taiga rubs a hand over his nose and then shrugs. “If I had know this would have happened, I would have used the sage earlier.”

Coyote's mirth causes little tornadoes of sand to dance across the desert. “If you had known, you would have consigned those leaves to the abyss!”

Taiga opens his mouth, pauses, and then shrugs. “Probably.”

“You have become more honest in this year,” Coyote observes. “This is a good thing. You will need that honesty in all of its ruthless hardness.”

Taiga feels himself go cold all over. Not quite meeting Coyote's eyes—and he's so, so glad that Coyote's decided to go with the traditional pair rather than the confusion of blinking eyes in the night sky—he cocks his head to the side. “Will I?”

“Are you trying for casualness, _atsilì_?” Coyote asks. Taiga squints the long, long way up to Coyote's muzzle, but he can't read whatever expression the elder god might be making. “It is not a good look for you. Passion! That is the look you must wear.”

“Okay?” He shrugs his shoulders for emphasis. “I think the look I'm trying to wear is confused.”

He expects Coyote to cackle, laugh with his hideous cacophony of a thousand screeching voices, but instead the god just sighs and brings his head down to his mighty paws. “You have little time for confusion, _atsilì_. You need to be certain of yourself and your abilities. Your passion will be your salvation.”

“Okay,” Taiga agrees both confused and a little alarmed. The darkness seemed to be creeping towards them with little tendrils inching across the sand, devouring it inch by golden inch. He reaches up without looking to rub along the paw nearest him. “I can do passion.”

That does earn him a laugh, but it's more a soft huff of sound that gently blows the hair around his head. “Ah, _atsilì_ , I am old and it is time for you to sleep.”

He glances back at Coyote who winks once at him before dissolving into inky nothingness and a million blinking crimson eyes. Then there is nothing.

Taiga wakes to the sun trying to burn a hole in his face and a solid hour late for the last day of middle school.


	2. Back Beat, Word Is On The Street (That The Fire In Your Heart Is Out)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hello, Kuroko. (And the rest of Seirin)

When Taiga had thought about his entrance into high school, it had certainly not included the persistent tug of something on edges of his senses—not exactly demanding his attention, but rather politely waiting off on stage right. 

He digs his thumbs against his temples, grinding down hard against the veins there like he can drive out the pain through the sheer pressure of his thumbs. Gritting his teeth like he's about to take a punch definitely wasn't going to help the headache, but he finds himself unable to stop. He desperately wants to rub at his shoulders—which have gone rock hard and aching—but he barely has room to breathe, let alone move.

Someone stumbles up against him, bounces, and stutters apologies. Taiga glances down, full of pain and poor humor, to find some hapless second-year smiling uncertainly at him. “Basketball?”

There's precious little in Taiga's personal universe that could not be solved with basketball.

Unfortunately, that is apparently all the second year is capable of saying. Attempts to get the little kitten-faced senior to tell him either 1) what the basketball club is like, 2) what requirements for the club might be, or 3) even where the damned club table is all meet with abject failure. Glowering at his seniors earns him not a few unpleasant looks, so he gives that up for a bad job and just stuffs the second-year under one arm before marching off.

He quickly notices two things. First, that fuzzy, shadowy presence follows along behind them at a polite, respectful distance. And second, that the little second-year is not only capable of pointing in the general direction they needed to go, but seems quite pleased in general now that Taiga has assumed control over the situation.

He glowers down at the boy he's got shoved under one arm and gets a sheepish grin in response. “Do you even have a name?” he asks more rhetorically.

“Koganei! And turn left here,” comes the surprisingly chirpy response given the earlier shirking. Koganei seems content to just hang, suspended by Taiga's right arm, as they maneuver through the crowd, so they continue along like that: Koganei calling out directions in a cheery tone as if he isn't being hauled a long like a bag of rice, that irritating supernatural aura following along like the most polite stalker ever, and Taiga with the beginnings of what promises to be a spectacular migraine.

He's pleased that, when he finally reaches the table for the basketball club, he's capable of forming complete sentences. Short, terse sentences that suggest that he would dearly like to clobber everyone around him, but still sentences. The pair of second-years occupying the table regard him with the faint alarm most people use for the sudden appearance of a wild animal. 

Then one of the second-years, a girl with short brown hair and a sweater that hung over her slender fingers, catches sight of Koganei suspended in his grip and makes a series of very interesting faces. She opens and closes her mouth a couple of times, but nothing comes out. That prompts Koganei to struggle against his hold, like a cat that's suddenly been reminded that being carried is beneath its dignity, before proclaiming: “I brought back a new student.”

The expression that settles itself across the girl's pretty face would have caused him consternation if it weren't for the constant pressure of that creeping presence. A presence that feels like it was hovering right under his elbow, but when he chances a quick look around he finds nothing. There isn't even the weird scent the _ayakashi_ give off when they're up to their tricks. 

“Would you mind unhanding my player, please?” the girl asks with such silky sweetness that it snaps Taiga's attention back to her. She gives him gentle smile. He drops the little second-year like he's suddenly on fire. She gestures to the seat in front of her. He sits.

“So this is the basketball club?” he asks and then immediately wants to punch himself in the mouth for the way it makes her smile go slightly strange. The boy with glasses sitting next to her shifts ever so slightly away from her, like he's clearing a path for an incoming storm. 

“If you are interested in joining, you can fill out the new member form,” the girl says with that same sweet tone. The boys around her are definitely trying to get clear of her without actually looking like they're getting clear. Taiga would have found it funny, except he's pretty sure that storm was coming straight at him. 

He looks down at the form to hide his expression and then pulls a face for an entirely different reason. 

One of the nice things about middle school was the way the school had made things a little easier for returnees—hiragana next to complicated kanji characters, using full forms of words instead of short forms, things like that—Seirin, unfortunately, doesn't appear to have any such inclinations. The form is full of kanji he's got some inkling of through context, but the rest is a muddle.

The girl, manager maybe, watches him puzzle over the form for a little bit before doing a really impressive eye roll. “Just put down your name, where you went to middle school, and your motivations for joining the club.”

Through process of elimination he figures out which the bits of information are supposed to go where, opting for English where transliteration into kanji just makes his head hurt. Hurt worse than it already does. That waiting presence was still lurking nearby and the fact that Taiga can't seem to pinpoint it any better than “close” makes him want to beat his head against the table. The muscles in his shoulders are twitching at a steady tempo, his delts pulling hard and tight like he's expecting a knife in the back. His neck aches with how much he wants to look around and he's painfully conscious of time he rubs at it. 

He all but rockets out of the chair once he gets the form filled out, but the girl catches his sleeve between two fingers. A delicate, gentle hold, but it might as well be a steel handcuff in the way it locks him to the table. She's got a force to her, a will that Taiga finds hard to ignore or disobey. 

“No, wait,” the girl says without looking at him. “Don't you have any goals for joining?”

He blinks at her and then bites down on the obvious “to play basketball?” because clearly this is one of those weird cultural traps that the Japanese love to lay for the unwary. “Not really?”

She gives him a flinty look. “Nothing at all?”

Taiga shrugs one shoulder at her, careful not to disrupt her hold on him. He doesn't know what to tell her. Basketball is basketball is basketball. It isn't terribly different no matter where you are. Well, maybe it's a little different in Japan since the only people he ever play with here are _ayakashi_ and they cheat like it was going out of style.

She lets go of him, chewing on her bottom in a way that suggests that this will not be the last time he hears about this. “Practice this afternoon. Right after classes.”

He nods and then beats a hasty retreat. It isn't until he was clear of the press of the crowd that he realizes that the pressure of that skulking presence is gone. As is his headache. Both vanished the moment the girl had laid hands on him. 

Huh.

–

When the afternoon finally rolls around Taiga's headache is back with a vengeance. That preternatural presence is making itself known again and he's pretty sure his literature teacher is just making up kanji at this point to fuck with him. If this is gonna to be his high school life he was going to need to stock up on painkillers and migraine medication.

He stomps his way the gymnasium in poor humor. People scatter before him and he can hear the susurration of whispers spring up in his wake. Girls put their heads together with wide eyes and boys watch him go with small frowns. Taiga heaves a sigh that starts somewhere in his toes. Not the reaction he necessarily wants in a new school, but not one he can really avoid, being big, foreign, and apparently in a permanent bad mood.

Something skitters along the edge of his vision and he snaps his head around fast enough to make the muscles of his neck protest, only to find the pretty expanse of the school's grounds. Trees wave gently in the spring breeze. Cherry blossoms bob charmingly along the path. Not a single _ayakashi_ to be seen anywhere and yet that pressure persists. When he found the source of it, he was going to strangle the ever-living fuck out of it because this nonsense is getting ridiculous.

When he steps through the gym doors the second-year with the glasses and short hair shoots him a quick glance and a frown. “Get changed before she comes in.”

Taiga does as he is told, only pausing to mouth 'she?' at another first year who his shakes his head, looking as confused as Taiga feels. 

'She' turns out to be the pretty brunette with short hair from earlier. This time she comes in with a whistle around her neck and a clipboard in one hand. Taiga is initially inclined to think manager, but the way she strides towards them like a conquering lord makes him pause on that judgment. 

“I'm Aida Riko, your coach,” she announces without fanfare. Taiga rubs his hand along his mouth, pulling the corners of mouth back down to a flat line, as the rest of the freshman react to that news. He also notices that the team's adviser, Takeda-sensei, is remarkably free of any lingering ghosts people of his age tended to collect. The old man raises a shaky hand when he notices Taiga's regard. He nods back to be polite before returning his attention to the girl—his coach. 

Aida's got a brisk, no-nonsense attitude that feels like home and makes him fight not to grin. He has to fake a quick coughing fit when she orders everyone's shirt off and gets a howling wave of protest. Though he kinda wants to protest himself. The hair on his arms rises in a feeble attempt to keep him warm and he shivers slightly in the cool spring air. Damn the Japanese and their general belief that schools do not require HVAC systems. 

Taiga listens with half an ear while Aida works her way down the line of first years, preferring to watch the way the second-year boys watch as their coach critiques, orders, and bullies the stunned first-years. They were watching her with expressions of proud glee, delight, or in the case of the boy with glasses, open adoration. That's, Taiga decides, a good sign.

When Aida gets to him she freezes, face stuck in an expression Taiga can't quite interpret. She stares at him so long that he starts to worry that something might be seriously wrong with him. He doesn't think he's slacked off in his training. True, he isn't running endless laps after Coyote in Griffith Park anymore, but he doesn't think he's getting soft.

“What?” he asks, as his hand coming up to rub self-consciously at the back of his head. “It is cold in here.”

The boy with glasses floats up behind Aida and murmurs something to her with a small smile playing around the corners of his mouth. If he isn't their team captain, Taiga decides, he'll eat his shorts. 

Aida shakes herself like a cat that's been sprinkled with water before giving him a sharper once-over. Taiga's nerves flicker in his stomach as she eyes the small line of scars around his hip, the discoloration across his shoulder that he can normally pass off as a birthmark, and the other myriad little signs on his body that he's tangled with _ayakashi_ and other preternatural creatures. (Or Coyote's training methods had gotten a little out of hand.)

He resists the urge to cross his arms as she makes a full circuit around his body. Taiga jams his fists on his hips, more to put them somewhere than to make a statement, and cocks an eyebrow at her. Eventually Aida crosses her arms and purses her lips, that flinty look back in her eyes. He cocks his head to the side and contrives to look innocent. Her lips thin down to a tight, white line. Taiga drops his hands and shifts from foot to foot, trying for harmless instead. 

Eventually, she huffs out an irritated breath. “That right side IT band is tight. Stretch,” she commands, as if that were the only thing bothering her. Taiga almost sighs with relief until he notices the way her fingers drum along her arm and her eyes remain tight and hot. This is gonna to be another conversation she's gonna to come back to. But she spins away from him on one heel, apparently willing to drop it for the day. “Kuroko Tetsuya! Ah? Not here?”

Taiga is in the process of pulling his shirt on when he hears a soft, “I am Kuroko,” right next to his elbow. Even after a year of learning not to startle thanks to _ayakashi_ and spirits being pests he still jumps. Poor Coach Aida shrieks in alarm and slams backwards into the boy behind her. The rest of the team scatters like a bomb's gone off in their midst.

“I have been here the entire time,” says Kuroko, completely unperturbed by the commotion he's causing. Taiga can feel his face moving in strange ways before he rakes a hand over it to get it under control. 

Here's the source of that strange, lurking presence that he's been sensing all day. Taiga lets himself boggle at the slip of a boy since the rest of the first-years are doing the same. At first glance Kuroko Tetsuya doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary—just another slender Japanese kid with messy hair and big eyes. It isn't until Taiga takes that mental step backwards into his other way of seeing that all the ways in which Kuroko's just a little bit off pop up.

Taiga can't stop the frown that spreads across his face. The kid's _very_ strange on a spiritual level. If he's just a little wisp of a thing in the physical plane; he is nearly non-existent on the spiritual one. It's like someone's come through and pared off all the spare parts of him leaving him just the outline of a boy. Or perhaps it's better to say it is like someone had washed him out, so that Kuroko's what was left after you ran a black cloth the wash a million times. A soft, faded sort of gray that just blurred into the background. 

The frown deepens into a scowl as they play their first set of practice games and the second-years start shooting him skeptical looks.

Taiga doesn't want to look like he hates his entire team, but playing basketball with Kuroko is one of the more unsettling experiences of his life, and that includes watching Coyote grow to monstrous size and eat the moon. (That had been deeply upsetting.) Yeah, Kuroko isn't that great of a player. But it isn't the way that the kid just can not seem to make a shot, can't jump, can't drive, can't dribble. Just flat out can't do any of the fundamentals. It's the way that he keeps disappearing into the shadows—his spiritual self fuzzing around the edges until there's nothing there but the after-image of a boy. 

Taiga's seen something similar in the shadowmen Coyote made from sticks. They had been strange, skulking figures living within the Fourth World between spirit and flesh, with the same nagging presence that had itched at back of his mind. When he had mentioned it to Coyote the elder god had made a strange face—strange even for him—and said something incomprehensible about needing a “strong sense of faith in one's self” in order to deal with them. Which had been incoherent even for Coyote. 

Several thousand miles, one large ocean, and thirteen months and Coyote's weird and still making Taiga's life weird.

The combination between Kuroko's itching presence, general weirdness, and the poor showing of the first-years takes Taiga's mood from 'poor' and dunks it straight into 'blacker than Baba-yaga's heart.' When one of the freshmen, after the boy who just has to be the captain sinks a beautiful three pointer into the net, sighs with defeat and mutters, “There was no way for us to win in the beginning,” Taiga's entire field of vision goes softly crimson.

Next thing Taiga knows he has the other freshman by his shirt and is trying very hard not to shake him until his teeth rattle out of his head. He feels Kuroko's presence sort of … buzz right before that little slip of a thing takes his knees out from under him.

“Please calm down,” is all Kuroko says like hadn't just jijutsu-ed Taiga. Taiga opens his mouth to bitch about it but Kuroko's aura starts to do some very, very strange things. Like becoming ever so slightly unhinged from the boy himself, oozing away from Kuroko in faint gusts of shadow. It ripples up and off Kuroko in waves that pulse like a heartbeat. Taiga's torn between wanting to rip into him and wanting to stick his aura under a microscope, because _what the fuck?_ Kuroko glances at the other freshmen like Taiga isn't laying flat out at his feet. “Excuse me, but could you please pass me the ball?”

Taiga watches as he adjusts his arm bands, which seems to be sort of focus for what Kuroko does next, which is to just completely fucking disappear. 

On the court it's like he's doing some sort of mundane magic trick of misdirection and slight-of-hand. On the spiritual plane, however, Kuroko's aura fades into the shadow he's named after. His spirit-self finally blends into the Fourth World the way it's been threatening to do the entire time Taiga's been watching him.

Pass after vanishing, incomprehensible pass blur past the second-years. Another time Taiga would've deeply enjoyed the shouts of confusion. It's a good trick, the _yako_ brothers would love it, but for an otherwise totally normal human to do it? That's just god damned weird. 

He's mulling the possible explanations for why Kuroko would be able to pull something like that off when, just for a moment, the oozing layer of shadow around Kuroko solidifies around him like a double image in an over-developed photo. Which is weird and upsetting. And then that double image turns to look at Taiga with eyes that contrive to be even darker than black. That makes the hair on the back of Taiga's neck stand on end and it's all he can do to pay attention to the game. 

Good thing that he does pay attention to the game because weird metaphysics or no weird metaphysics, Kuroko still cannot shoot worth a damn. 

“Score properly, idiot!” Taiga snarls as he turns Kuroko's flub into an alley-oop, because seriously if you are going to do whatever the fuck it is that Kuroko had done to himself in order to play basketball you might as well whole-ass it. Half-assing anything to do with the spiritual realm never resulted in anything good.

Kuroko just gives him a faint smile, like he expected that. Taiga returns that smile with a grin that is really just a way to show him all of his teeth. Or, more precisely, show all his teeth to the thing that he can now see rising off Kuroko like steam.

Lesson one from Coyote: if you have a choice between anger and fear, pick anger, and so he settles down to enjoy a good solid rage.

–

He's still pissed off when he slouches his way to his favorite burger joint. The anger chases itself in his stomach until his entire core is just a big knot of tense muscles and unhappiness. Not that that stops him from ordering his own body weight in hamburgers. Growing boy, blah blah blah.

Taiga knows Kuroko is in the restaurant with him. He can feel that low buzz of energy that he now knows to associate with Kuroko. It makes his eyebrows hitch low over his eyes and the big vein on his temple jump. He's going to end up with a permanent twitch because of this. He just knows it.

Taiga doesn't even jump at the quiet, “Good evening,” that Kuroko delivers when he decides to reveal himself. He just glowers.

“Don't even bother trying to tell me you were here the entire time,” Taiga says by way of a greeting. “I know you weren't.”

That gets him a soft smile. “But I was.” 

Taiga puts two fingers against his eyes and presses down, then drags them along his nose before pulling them away from his face. That helps both with the headache and the weird double image he'd been getting of Kuroko. For a moment he'd seen both the boy and the shadow-spirit super-imposed over him. 

He thinks about asking Kuroko just what the fuck he's managed to do to himself. If Kuroko knew that he's got some sort of shadow creature stuck to him like one of those after-images you got in messed up pictures. But given the way Kuroko is watching him with an expression as calm as the Pacific on a warm day, Taiga's inclined to think he has no idea. At least he'd like to think that someone with a miscellaneous spirit glued to them would not be that calm. 

This line of thought takes him through three hamburgers before he finally feels in control enough to chance conversation. He tosses one of the burgers at Kuroko, who arches an eyebrow at him. “For today. You earned at least one of these.”

And, Taiga thinks to himself, the boy looks like he needs to eat a burger or sixteen. Too skinny by half and washed out looking to boot. He isn't sure what having something like that shadow-thing stuck to a person would do to them, but he's willing to bet his entire food allowance that it's draining Kuroko's energy in ways a growing boy can't afford. 

“Interesting trick on the court,” he says when the silence drags well into the awkward territory.

Kuroko cocks his head to the side. “Do you disapprove of my basketball?”

Taiga desperately wants to say: 'hell, yes I disapprove,' or maybe 'in what universe is binding a shadow-spirit to yourself playing basketball,' or maybe 'just what the ever living fucking fuck have you fucking done, you fucking idiot.' But he's pretty sure that none of those statements would get him much further than polite confusion. Instead, he opts for attacking another of his burgers and eyeballing Kuroko to give himself time to think.

“Too soon to say,” he says after a while. That seems to surprise Kuroko. Not that a person could really tell, his expressions are as minimal as his spirit-self. “Let's do a couple of one-on-ones.”

Now Kuroko just looks amused. It's a subtle look, but a good one. The corners of his lips turn up and his eyes get a nice gleam to them. Taiga wants to tell him that now he looks like a real boy, but he figures that probably would go over poorly. “You do realize how those would go, yes?”

Taiga listens to the cadence of that simple statement, sort of amazed at amount of bitter packed into such a short sentence. He plows through another burger before answering, making Kuroko's mouth scrunch up a little—tight and displeased. “Nah,” Taiga finally says, licking ketchup off one thumb. “I don't know how they would go.”

Kuroko makes a small, frustrated sound. “Kagami-kun,” he says in a tone that suggests he thinks Taiga is rather slow. “My basketball is not the sort that can be played one-on-one.”

Taiga contemplates Kuroko and his general obstinacy while polishing off the last of his burgers. “Well. So?”

Kuroko makes another of those frustrated noises and tries to glare at Taiga while using the absolute minimum number of facial muscles. Taiga briefly wonders if he is giving Kuroko's face the work out of the year with all the expressions he's managing to pull out of him. “Kagami-kun, there really isn't anything to be learned from that.”

Taiga crumples the last of the burger wrappers before collecting them all into a little mountain on his tray. “Humor me,” he suggests. “Call it a bad habit I picked up in the States, but I like to see things for myself.”

That does the trick, as it generally does. Taiga will never not be amazed at the casual way the Japanese are willing to believe returnees are dumb and lacked social graces. At least it's easier to get what he wants when expectations are so low. Kuroko sighs as if being asked to play basketball were some sort of massive burden, but follows him easily enough.

Taiga wants to ask what made him so very bitter about basketball, makes it so playing is some sort of burden to be borne rather than a joy, but the tight expression on Kuroko's face makes him reconsider the question. Some hurts, he reminds himself, he doesn't need to go poking. Instead he peppers Kuroko with idle questions as they make their way towards the street courts and gets a pile of interesting facts in return.

Like the names of all the second-years on his team. (Hah, the guy with glasses was totally their captain. Called it.)

And the fact that Kuroko's middle school was deeply and impressively fucked up, though Kuroko doesn't say so in so many words. It's just that the pauses are very expressive.

And that there are five guys from Teikou called the _kiseki no sedai_ and god damnit hadn't anyone told the Japanese that when you give something a name you can end up changing that thing?

Taiga pauses in the middle of the street when Kuroko rattles off that name like it's something he should have heard before. “Seriously?” he asks, keeping his voice light. “Generation of miracles? Isn't that a little pretentious?” 

Kuroko gives him a look like he can't figure out if Taiga is messing with him or what. “They are very good at basketball,” he replies earnestly.

Taiga could just bet. But seriously, hadn't anyone had a thought that maybe naming a bunch of kids something like _kiseki no sedai_ might have consequences? He bites back a sigh at the general obliviousness of human beings. That name is just begging for trouble to come down on all of them. Though that might explain something about his new teammate. “You were a starter for Teikou—you parta that?”

Kuroko looks down at the basketball he'd been carrying, a small line forming between his eyebrows, and all Taiga can think is ah-ha, here it is. “No. I am a different type of player from them.”

Taiga tosses his bag and jacket onto one of the benches before giving Kuroko the two-handed 'gimme' gesture. Kuroko obligingly tosses him the ball and Taiga dribbles it idly for a while. It isn't until he jerks his chin at the waiting benches that Kuroko finally sheds his bag and jacket and stalks stiff-legged with offended dignity onto the court. “Yeah?” Taiga says once Kuroko gets his ass onto the court, “Show me.”

Kuroko doesn't roll his eyes, but Taiga sees the way the corners of those pretty blue peepers tighten like he desperately wants to and swallows a grin. He's beginning to think that Kuroko isn't used to having someone mess with him, which is pretty funny given the way he clearly loves to mess with other people.

The first thing that Taiga notices about Kuroko's game is that it is fundamentally _pissed the fuck off_. The anger is there in the way that Kuroko insists on always driving for the hoop even when he should feint. The way he'll drop for a three-pointer when he could just as easily go for a lay-up. The way that he tries to go toe-to-toe with Taiga despite Taiga having at least ten kilos on him and a dozen centimeters. For a dude whose entire teamwork game revolves around subtlety and discretion, his individual game is a blunt hammer. 

Taiga lets Kuroko slam himself against Taiga's game until some of that furious temper wears off and he starts to pant a little. 

“So why do you play like you're, like, two times bigger?” he asks curiously. Because, shit, there's a lot of pent-up aggression and hostility in that game.

The way that Kuroko's shoulders snap into a tight, hard line and his head goes down like a bull getting ready to charge tells Taiga that he has managed to take his entire foot and shove it right in his mouth. “Isn't obvious that Kagami-kun is the stronger?” Kuroko retorts.

Taiga opens up his mouth to say that isn't what he meant and then closes it as he eyes Kuroko. There's a particular stubborn light in those pale blue eyes, a tightness around their corners, that suggests Kuroko's set his mind about something. Taiga rubs at his forehead while he considers the little ball of rage in front of him. Anything he says now is gonna to be heard through whatever history Kuroko's got with the game itself, and Taiga can see that it's one helluva history.

Taiga shrugs at Kuroko and dribbles the ball idly to give himself space to think. Playing Kuroko one-on-one is an enlightening experience. All that anger brought Kuroko into tighter focus. Whatever he's managed to call up from the Fourth World has a harder time riding him when he's pissed off and trying to use basketball as the stick to beat people with. Yeah, he's worse at basketball without it, but Taiga's pretty sure it's the rage causing that. One-on-one, Kuroko keeps trying to play like someone he isn't. Someone bigger and wilder. 

“So why do you play?” Taiga asks, trying for neutral and non-confrontational. Clearly he fails, because Kuroko's mouth tightens up again. 

“Because I love basketball,” he replies, and there's a throbbing sincerity there that surprises Taiga given the rage in his one-on-one. “But I'm different from Kagami-kun. I'm a shadow.”

For a second Taiga can only stand there gob-smacked. Someone really, really needs to teach the entire Japanese population that they can't just go around calling things—people—stuff like _kiseki no sedai_ or shadows or what-the-fuck-ever and not have consequences with a capital 'c.' “I'm sorry?” 

He listens with dawning horror as Kuroko explains to him with all evident sincerity of his intention of being the 'shadow' to Taiga's 'light' so that they can 'defeat the Generation of Miracles.' And where does a guy even start to deal with crazy going on in that? Because seriously, who is he? Scott Pilgrim? Not to mention the more Kuroko talks about being a 'shadow' the more that he starts to give off wisps of smoky darkness. 

Taiga chews on the inside of his cheek as Kuroko continues to talk, more animated than Taiga has seen him during the entire six hour period they've been together. There are _hand gestures_. Kuroko actually manages to have more than two facial expressions. 

He presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose and inhales deeply. As much as he wants to go off on a rant, he gets the feeling that would be deeply counterproductive. Kuroko's got the basketball in a death grip when Taiga finally opens up his eyes to study him. Those pale fingers dig into the ball until the thick plastic bends. The more pressure Kuroko puts on the ball, the more shadowy tendrils waft off him like a rising steam. 

“No,” Taiga says as gently as he knows how. He has to raise one hand as Kuroko's nostrils flare. “No making me the best in Japan. We will be the best in Japan, okay?”

He's not sure Kuroko hears the distinction, but he doesn't press the issue since it gets him a jerky nod of agreement. 

“If you go up against them as you are now,” Kuroko says. “You will be killed instantly.”

Taiga makes a face, sticking his tongue out at Kuroko. “And you couldn't think of another way of putting that?”

Because, seriously, that's not the sort of thing the kid with something pulled out of the Fourth World riding him needed to be saying. For some reason Kuroko finds that funny and some of the furious tension goes out of his shoulders. Taiga slants him a look as they collect their things. He wonders, briefly, what the hell Kuroko actually hears when they talk about basketball. He has a feeling it isn't actually what he's saying. 

–

The one-on-one with Kuroko and the subsequent—deeply weird—conversation rattles around in Taiga's head the way he rattles around his empty apartment. 

He can't figure out what's going on Kuroko's head. He's pretty sure that _Kuroko_ can't figure out what's going on in his own head. That creature riding him, however tenuously, worries Taiga. The fact that Kuroko insists on calling himself a shadow—with such bitterness and pride—worries him. The idea that there's another five guys out there with similar problems (because, seriously, what the fuck, calling a bunch of kids _kiseki no sedai_ , what the fuck) worries him. 

Taiga flops himself out across his futon, rubbing his palms against his eyes. “On the list of stupid bullshit I expected to deal with in Japan, this was definitely not on it,” he mutters to himself.

The inside of his lip is raw from where he keeps worrying at it and it takes a concentrated force of will to stop himself. 

“I'm a shadow. I can make my light the best in Japan. Oh, my old teammates were called the Generation of Miracles. No, Kagami-kun, I have no idea why you think I am insane,” he grumbles. Dragging himself upright, he waves his hands around. “Yes, I will completely sacrifice my own game in order to make your game better. Because _that's_ healthy.”

Taiga fists his hands in his hair, as if tugging it into angry tufts will make the situation better. “Get it together, Taiga,” he tells himself, “there's work to do.”

It takes a little bit of digging, reshuffling boxes that never really seem to get completely unpacked, but eventually he excavates the pressed tobacco, dried agave, and little leather pouches Mrs. Calenza pressed upon him. Taiga had sometimes wondered if the cranky old lady had some sort of precognitive ability, but when he asked she given him a long look—her narrow lips pulling down on one side in distaste, as if the question itself had been offensive—and denied it. But all her gifts were always helpful, even the weird ones. Especially the weird ones.

He'd asked Coyote about the old lady, but the elder god had just laughed his cackling horror show of a laugh and that had been that. 

Taiga measures out the herbs with gentle precision as if they were gold dust. He figures if he's very careful, he's got enough to make medicine pouches for the entire team and their coach. With luck, he thinks, he can convince everyone take them as some sort of weird bonding thing the Japanese are so fond of. 

He's not completely sure the little pouches will even work. He'd only ever seen Mrs. Calenza make them once and when he had tried to replicate it Coyote had come along and rolled in all his herbs like they were fresh roadkill. He feels a little like a fraud as he finishes the last pouch. He doesn't feel any sort of … anything, really, making them. Taiga had thought he'd feel that little buzz of energy that sometimes happens when he casts, but all he really feels is that sort of crafter's focus. Just the normal concentration he feels when cooking or trying to darn his own socks. 

Mrs. Calenza had never chanted anything over the medicine pouches. Just measured out the herbs and pressed them into their little leather pouches while sucking on an ancient, foul-smelling pipe. He remembers her rather impressive eye-roll at him when he asked if maybe there shouldn't be a little bit of a ceremony when making the pouches. Maybe using the smudge sticks, or saying a prayer, or _somethin'_? 

She'd just grunted at him, annoyed and impatient, before saying, “That's a white man's thinking. Not everything needs words. Somethings just need to be. ”

Taiga still feels like maybe he ought to say something, but since she hadn't, he doesn't. He sets out the pouches on the windowsill so they will soak in the first morning light. After a long moment, he drags out an old dream-catcher he'd made in the fifth grade and hangs it in the morning. It probably won't do anything, but having it there makes him feel better.

He falls asleep staring at the line of little pouches like little soldiers on his windowsill.


	3. I Got A List of Demands Written On The Palms of My Hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kuroko meets the foxes. The foxes meet Coyote. Chaos for everybody!

It takes Taiga a long time to identify the horrible hell sound dragging him out of sleep as his alarm. He flounders at it twice, fails to connect both times, and then finally just slaps the dratted thing across the room, where it hits the wall with a sound that promises a trip to the hardware store later. It gives a last sulky squawk before falling silent. 

Day is already looking to be a pain in the ass. 

He trips over his blankets trying to achieve escape velocity from his futon and fetches up against the windowsill, scattering all the little medicine pouches he'd made last night. Taiga manages to catch three as they fall and swears when his fumbling knocks another under his dresser. 

He nearly dislocates a shoulder fishing it out and then stands glowering at his handiwork where they sit in a pile. Not the most auspicious start, he thinks. Taiga picks up one and lets it dangle in the light, and then wonders if maybe he should bead it a bit. He's never been much of a beader—mostly because he always seems to lose the larger image once he gets going—but as he considers the little pouches they seem distressingly bare.

Taiga lines them back up in their little row and sighs. He hates beading. He really, really, _really_ hates beading. It's the most excruciatingly boring thing that Mrs. Calenza had taught him. Focusing on the little beads and their fussy patterns always makes his eyes cross. And then stab himself with the needle. 

Chewing on his lip he can feel himself come to a decision he doesn't like. The pouches still look incomplete. They feel incomplete to him—lacking both the image and the metaphysical _oomph_ proper pouches ought to have. He makes a disgusted sound in the back of his throat before turning away from the windowsill and stomping towards the shower.

He chews on the problem as he soaps his hair and then shouts in wordless frustration as the inevitable conclusion keeps asserting itself no matter how many times he tries to find away around it. Beading. Fucking beading. Taiga restrains himself, barely—his hands still balled into fists, from punching the shower wall. 

Hair still dripping down his back, towel slung haphazardly across his hips, he stomps his way back to his bedroom windowsill after his shower to glower at the little medicine pouches. Taiga picks up one again to study it. He can feel his lips do the irritated twist to one side, just like Mrs. Calenza when she's annoyed. 

The pouch turns slowly from its straps in his grip, the sun turning the soft buckskin a pale gold. 

“I hate beading,” Taiga growls at it, as if it can hear him. “Hate it.”

–

Classes do not improve Taiga's mood. Kuroko's presence prickles at him like an itch he can't quite reach. The universe, in its infinitely evil humor, had seen fit to ensure that Kuroko sits right behind him where that unsettling presence hits square between his shoulders all. fucking. day. long. Taiga spends most of his classes hunkered down over his desk, trying to make as small a target as possible for his teachers and their terrible questions.

Taiga's not sure what he's done to the universe to deserve Kuroko Tetsuya, but the little shit has every appearance of thoroughly enjoying his effect on Taiga's mental state. He really wants to yell at the wisp of a boy that he is not Kuroko's personal plaything, but he's pretty sure that wouldn't get him anything 'cept one of Kuroko's faint smiles. Smug little shadow-ridden _asshole_.

The way all of his teachers visibly despair at his fumbling attempts at kanji, his complete ignorance of the 'classics' of Japanese literature—assholes should slog their way through _Great Gatsby_ and then get back to him about 'persevering to understand literature'—and his shaky grasp of Japanese history makes him want to drop out of school and be a surfer bum on Zuma Beach for the rest of his life. Kuroko's faint, judgmental sigh when he fails to correctly identify Nobunaga as the first of the warlords during the unification of Japan makes him revise his future planning. Strangle Kuroko, _then_ move back to California to surf for the rest of his life.

He particularly hates the way the teachers are so fond of making students stand up and read out loud sections of their textbook. Well, it's helpful when other people are reading out loud. Much less helpful when he's the one who has to stand and stutter his way through the passages. 

Kuroko kinda redeems himself by quietly murmuring the kanji Taiga doesn't recognize to him. By the time they get to modern composition, they've got a nice little system going. The teachers never seem to notice Kuroko, even when he's basically reading _for_ Taiga. 

Math is the only bright spot in the day. Numbers are numbers are numbers. Sure, they're covering slightly different things in Japan, but he figures it out pretty quick. (Why the Japanese want to cover some advanced trig subjects in algebra II he doesn't know, but whatever.) It's the one class where he fixes his teacher with the call-on-me eyeball, which seems to frighten and delight the tiny woman.

He breaks the chalk twice, causes it to make an ungodly noise once, but somehow Taiga manages to get the entire problem that he can solve in his head on the damned blackboard. When his teacher starts making a skeptical humming noise in the back of her throat he gives her a baleful look. He knows he's got the problem right.

“Is there something wrong with my work?” he asks. Then thinks about it and adds, “Teach.”

The expression she turns on him is caught somewhere between scandalized and amused. “Your method of solving the problem....”

Taiga looks over his work. “It's wrong?”

“No,” she says quickly. “Just, this is not a formula that we have covered yet.”

“Oh.” He makes a face. “I can do the long way, but this is faster. Much simpler just to take derivative here and plug it in there.”

His teacher sighs. “We've not yet covered derivatives yet, Kagami-kun.”

Taiga gives her sad puppy eyes. “It's a lot faster this way, Teach.” And he always fucks up the long way. 

She pats his arm. “It is. Perhaps you could come to the teachers' lounge after class and we can discuss what subjects you have covered?”

So much for math being easier. He feels deeply wounded at his favorite subject's betrayal.

–

When he finally gets free of his math teacher (and his Japanese teacher, and his literature teacher, and his English language teacher, and really all his teachers—once they'd seen him in the teachers' lounge they'd descended on him like the pack of hyenas they were) and gets to the gym, he's got a headache drilling right between his eyes with the force of a jackhammer driven by a demented hand. The rest of the first-years give him one look and scramble out his way. The second-years exchange glances that he can't decipher and doesn't have the mental resources to try.

A quick look around the gym assures him that he's not missed too much yet. The thud and beat of the balls against the backboard and the squeak of shoes against the court are a welcome tempo. The pain in his head recedes like the tide going out as he listens to the sounds of the game, leaving him feeling wrung out, but functional. Taiga smiles to himself and tries not to think too much about what Alex would have to say about the fact that basketball solves his migraine problems.

Taiga's about to insert himself into the shooting drills when their tiny coach plants herself in his path without a care for how he outweighs her by nearly thirty kilos. As he's pinwheeling his arms to keep from running over her, it occurs to Taiga that Aida Riko is like a black cat who thinks she's a panther. Zero fear of anything. 

“You're late,” she says with a tone that suggests he should make his excuses quickly.

“Teachers wanted to talk to me,” Taiga replies, hoping against hope that this will be enough.

Aida's mouth twists. “It's too early in the year to be having academic trouble.”

He notes that this is a pronouncement, not a question.

“Kagami-kun is a returnee, Aida-kantoku,” Kuroko interjects without any visible reaction to the way it makes both Taiga and Aida jerk. 

Once she composes herself, Aida fixes Kuroko with an irritated glare. “I am aware.”

“Our teachers wanted to talk to him regarding the differences between the American and Japanese curriculum,” Kuroko continues smoothly, his face never moving from polite helpfulness despite their coach's glare. Taiga can't help but be impressed. 

Aida turns back to Taiga and raises an eyebrow. “So you aren't in trouble?”

“Not yet,” he replies before his brain can engage. Which, god dammit, _mouth_. 

Fortunately, his thoughtless remark just seems to amuse her. Aida gives him a dry look. “Honest, aren't you?”

“A little too much,” Taiga says, again before his brain can get in there and edit. Aida studies him for a long breath, clearly looking to see if he's fucking with her. Taiga thinks about looking innocent, but that never seems to work for him, so he just sighs and shrugs.

To his infinite surprise, Aida reaches out and pats his arm. “Go join the passing drills, Kagami-kun.”

Taiga lopes off join the rest of the first-years where they are making awkward passes to each other, when Aida calls out to him again. “Try to avoid drawing the attention of the teachers, Kagami-kun.”

He spreads his hands in an appealing gesture. “I always _try_ , Coach.”

She gives a long, assessing look that starts at the top of his bright red head and ends at his Nike covered feet. A rueful look crosses her face and she makes a little 'shoo' hand-movement at him. He notices that she grabs Kuroko's arm when the little sneak tries to slip past her and makes a mental note to ask Kuroko what that's about later. 

He's about to join the other first-years when the tallest second-year catches him by the back of his t-shirt and redirects him to where second-years are doing speed passes. Taiga shoots the boy a questioning look and just gets a chin jerk in the direction of the other second-years. He feels uneasy about being separated from the rest of the first-years, but he goes easily enough.

That gets him an approving clap on his shoulder from the lanky second-year. 

“Koganei, Itsuki, go join the first-years,” barks Hyuuga as Taiga trots up to him. The sharp-eyed boy says something that Taiga finds completely incomprehensible. The rest of the upperclassmen groan while Taiga is trying to puzzle out the Japanese. “Without the bad puns, Itsuki.”

“That was a pun?” he asks his captain as the two boys head towards the wide-eyed first-years. 

Hyuuga gives him a look that's remarkably similar to Aida's--suspiciously searching for fuckery. His captain huffs an irritated sigh after deciding Taiga's as confused as he seems. “A really bad one.” He studies Taiga for a minute and then shouts over his shoulder. “Hey, Itsuki! Your pun was so bad you confused the returnee.”

Itsuki gives them both an exaggeratedly pained look before getting a thoughtful expression that quickly slides to delighted mischievousness.

“No,” Hyuuga says before Itsuki can even open his mouth, holding out one hand like he can physically stop the words. “Don't you dare.”

Taiga listens intently, determined to this time to catch the pun he knows is coming, as Hyuuga tries futilely to stop their resident punster, but he's still working through the sentence as the rest of the boys complain loudly about the terribleness of the pun. He turns back to his captain and lets his confusion show on his face. “I, uh, didn't get that one either.”

Hyuuga looks at him for a long moment before howling at Itsuki. “Stop confusing the returnee!”

“The pun is in the kanji, Kagami-kun,” Kuroko explains as their upperclassmen squabble. Taiga is pleased that he only jumps a little bit. “It's in the way that kanji in returnee can mean both to return and to recover.”

“Huh,” he says as he turns that over, then he has a disconcerting thought. “You mean I need to _think_ in kanji to get this sh-stuff?”

“It would be helpful,” Kuroko says, clearly thoughtful, like Taiga's done something unexpected. Taiga says a lot of unpleasant things at that thought, fortunately all of them in English. Kuroko looks mildly stunned while the rest of the team blinks at him in surprise.

“Well, now that Kagami-kun has given us an English lesson that probably isn't in our textbooks it's time to play a practice game,” announces Aida, clapping her hands to get their attention. Taiga notes the way the upperclassmen immediately line themselves up as if for her inspection. And Aida, for her part, walks that line like a general before her troops. 

Taiga takes a half-step back to line himself up with Kuroko, trying to mirror the upperclassmen without being too obvious about it. Kuroko slants him an amused look, but through some sorta magic manages to get the other first-years to form a meandering line. 

“Kagami, Kuroko, Koganei, Mitobe, and Furihata, you're a team,” Aida decides. Hyuuga makes a disagreeing noise that sounds, to Taiga's ear, a little disappointed. Their coach turns to give him a questioning glance, one eyebrow raised. The two of them then have a conversation that consists entirely of facial expressions and minute gestures. Taiga wonders just how long the two of them have known each other to pull that one off. After a couple of minutes of this while the rest of the team stands around looking confused or amused, year depending, Hyuuga huffs a sigh of defeat.

“Itsuki, Tsuchida, and the rest of you – with me,” Hyuuga commands. “Strategy meeting.”

Aida makes an amused sound. “It's not that serious. I just want test a theory.”

Hyuuga jerks a thumb in Taiga's direction. “Need to think of something to deal with the pair of 'em.”

Taiga glances at Kuroko, at the very least to trade confused looks, but Kuroko just watches Hyuuga herd his team together as if he expected that reaction. Taiga shifts his gaze from Kuroko's blankly passive face to the rest of his team. “Should we have a strategy?” he asks.

Koganei blinks at him. “Get the ball to you as much as possible?”

Taiga makes a disgusted noise. “That's not a strategy.”

The first-years watch, bemused, as Mitobe gently jostles Koganei until he finally offers, “Watch out for Hyuuga's three-point shot.” 

Mitobe nods.

“If he doesn't make it in, then Tsuchida will make sure it does on the rebound,” Koganei cautions, serious for the first time since Taiga had met him. “And Itsuki will be their playmaker.” Mitobe nods again, and then pats Koganei on the back.

“I can make it … difficult for Itsuki-senpai,” Kuroko comments lightly as he adjusts his wristbands. 

Taiga breathes out slowly, thinking. Coach Aida had put a surprisingly strong team against them, depending on how Kawahara and Fukuda handled being split from Furihata. “They don't have a center or any real power forwards over there. So they'll try to keep it an outside game as much as possible. We need to get them under the net and stay there.”

Mitobe clasps him on the shoulder again, his hand a heavy weight on Taiga's shoulder. He takes that as an agreement from their center. Taiga points to Koganei. “You know Hyuuga best and have the most mobility, mark him and keep him from those shots.”

Koganei makes a hangdog face. “You don't know how hard that is.”

“Just try,” Taiga replies. “You've got the best chance of it. Mitobe will be under the net. You,” he points to his fellow first-year. “Can you be our small forward?”

That clearly startles Furihata. “Uh. Yeah. Yeah! I can do that.”

“Cool,” Taiga says and then studies Kuroko. “Point guard.”

Kuroko makes a frustrated noise. “Kagami-kun, we have _talked_ about this,” he starts.

Taiga shakes his head, cutting Kuroko off before he can begin whatever weird explanation he was going to give. “You were lookin' to take Itsuki on earlier. That makes you point guard. He's gonna be making their plays, you'll be messin' them up, which means you also have to be making _our_ plays. Point guard.” 

Kuroko doesn't say anything, just studies him thoughtfully. Taiga waits for a bit and then arches an eyebrow at him. Kuroko lets out a small breath that would've been a sigh of epic proportion for anyone else. “Fine.”

“Awesome,” Taiga replies and then punches his fist into his hand. “Let's kick ass.”

“By all means, take as much time as you would like, boys.” Aida remarks dryly. He shoots her a sheepish look. She rolls her eyes at him before pointing to the court where Hyuuga is already waiting. Taiga can feel the corners of his lips curl back into a predatory smile. The look in his captain's eyes promises a good game. 

Playing with Kuroko is still weird—the way he fades into the background of the game only to pop out at key moments—but Taiga's starting to get the feel for it. It's a matter of trust. Once he lets go of his distrust of Kuroko and his damned shadow-spirit, the flow of the game re-orders itself to account for the black hole that is Kuroko Tetsuya's team game. Like a black hole, Kuroko pulls the energy of the team into himself—or that shadow-spirit does—and spits it back out in the form of twisting, incomprehensible pass after twisting pass. 

But Taiga still distrusts that little side-step Kuroko does into the Fourth World, and the way little tendrils of shadow stick to the ball after he passes it worries Taiga. When Koganei catches one of the passes and then promptly fumbles it, obviously reacting to the spiritual weirdness left on the ball, Taiga makes a snap decision.

Using Coyote's tooth as a focus, Taiga steals the ball from Fukuda, and then dribbles it once, twice, three times in perfect tempo with his heartbeat. He thinks about drumbeats and the rise and fall of the singers' voices. He thinks about bead rattles rasping out the beat for the dancers. Taiga feels the ball heat under his fingers as he drives towards the basket, the rubber warming like a lizard in the sun. 

When he dunks it over Tsuchida's block the ball is clear of any lingering shadows. If it glows a little bit no one else seems to notice. 

He keeps doing that every time Kuroko's passes leave little tendrils shadow clinging to the ball until Mitobe suddenly appears in front of him like a brick wall made of annoyed teenaged boy.

“Didn't your momma ever teach you to _share_?” Koganei asks, voice high and sharp with irritation. Mitobe cocks his head to the side, his mouth a flat line. Taiga fights the urge to shuffle his feet like a chastised toddler.

“I ….” Taiga trails off as he realizes that he has absolutely no good way of explaining himself. 

“If you say that you're the only one who can score I will cause you pain,” Koganei remarks in a suspiciously calm tone, like he's discussing the weather. “I mean, I might have to leave tacks in your shoes like a mean girl in a shoujo cliché, but I will cause you pain.”

Mitobe nods. 

“I wasn't going to say that,” Taiga retorts, feeling stung. “I just … wasn't thinkin'.”

“Well, maybe start thinking about the rest of your team,” Koganei comments dryly. Mitobe jostles him for a moment and Koganei just swats his hand way. That earns him an eye-roll and another poke. There's a surreal moment where Mitobe and Koganei have a conversation reminiscent of their coach and captain's early conversation—entirely composed of hand gestures and expressive faces. It makes Taiga feel weirdly lonely for a moment.

“Mitobe wants to know how long it's been since you've played with a team,” Koganei says after a moment.

Taiga blinks. “Like, a year? Maybe a year 'n a half?”

Koganei blinks back at him. “Oh. You were right,” he says to Mitobe. “It is a bad solo player habit. Okay.”

“Perhaps we could have the analysis of our rookie's shortcomings during the _post_ -game discussions, hm?” Aida calls from the sidelines, jerking all three of them back to the game. “The practice game isn't over yet.”

To emphasize Aida's comment Hyuuga sinks a glorious three-pointer over Furihata's head, who then turns a wounded look on the three of them. 

Taiga resists the urge to steal the ball every time he notices the little shadow tendrils clinging to it, but he purifies it every time he's got a hold of it. Which happens significantly less when he finds himself suddenly triple-teamed by a very determined Fukuda, Kawahara, and Tsuchida. They can't really stop him when he focuses, but it's enough to frustrate him. 

“Oh, come on,” he snarls when Tsuchida fouls him. His upperclassmen just puts two fingers above his eyebrow, a cocky little salute. 

Fortunately, the fact that they've managed to effectively close him down doesn't seem to slow down the rest of his team. Kuroko just starts re-routing the ball to Koganei, who might be an unreliable shot but makes up for it with determination and a complete refusal to let any misses shake his focus on the game. 

Or to Mitobe, who is a terror under the net without Tsuchida to challenge him. While Koganei manages to miss as many shots as he makes, Mitobe easily snags them over Itsuki's head to make the rebounds. 

Furihata even makes a couple of tricky shots that have this weird hesitating quality to them that clearly stumps defenders.

Taiga starts feeling a little like a useless appendage as the game progresses and the triple-team effectively takes him out of the game. Which is probably why he starts eating fouls like they're the breakfast of champions until he's sitting on his fourth by the end of the game and getting an earful from his coach.

“Really, Kagami-kun, you need to pay attention when you're being triple-teamed like that. You can't just try to force your way through on your talent alone. You need to think,” Aida finishes, though her tone suggests that she doesn't expect him to hear half of it or follow the other.

But he is thinking about it, just not the way that she expects. Something about the way she lectures him about trying to coast on his talent is ringing bells in his memory. Something, something brute force making things worse, something. He's pretty sure he's heard this lecture before, just in a different context.

Taiga's so lost in his own thoughts that he doesn't realize that his coach has stopped her lecture and is now giving him a long, hard look. “Yes, coach.”

She sighs hard enough make her bangs flutter. “If even a third of that penetrated your head, I'll be happy,” she says by way of dismissal.

“You should also try to avoid upsetting our coach, Kagami-kun,” Kuroko comments, tone as politely helpful as ever.

“No shit.”

–

Kuroko does, in fact, ambush him at the burger joint, something that both amuses and annoys him. It's like the universe has decided to give him his own pocket ninja who is both extremely helpful and extremely frustrating. Since Taiga was expecting Kuroko Tetsuya's idea of socialization he hasn't actually bought his own body weight in burgers, just enough for a light snack, so he's ready to hit the eject button as soon as necessary. 

He doesn't dignify Kuroko's quiet, “Good evening,” with a response, just eyes him over his second hamburger. Kuroko, for his part, seems content to suck on his vanilla milkshake and watch passersby through the window.

“So. Spit it out,” he says after he finishes plowing through his burger.

“Excuse me?” Kuroko asks, blinking those enormous, blue eyes at him.

Taiga rolls his own, far less pretty, eyes in return. “Does that actually work on anyone? Like, does anyone actually fall for the big-eyed Disney princess routine, or did you make that up special to annoy me?”

It takes him less than a second to figure out that this was spectacularly not the thing to say as Kuroko's face goes completely blank with an odd twitch around the corner of his lips. Kid apparently has more landmines than a field in Cambodia. “I am not sure I understand what you mean?”

“I … you know what, never mind,” Taiga says. Any attempt to explain or apologize would just have him digging for gold and best to stop while he's ahead. “So what do you want to talk about, because I don't think you are here for my sterling company.”

Kuroko side-eyes him pretty hard, but seems content to let the entire foot-in-mouth episode slide. “You did sit at my table.”

Taiga puts his drink down and just stares at Kuroko. He keeps at it until Kuroko shifts slightly, it's a tiny movement, but Taiga knows he's got him. But seeing as Taiga actually wants the little sneak to talk he decides not to push it. “Sure,” he says after a while. “What did Coach Aida want?”

He pretends to ignore little breath Kuroko lets out at his change of topic. Kid clearly has something that he wants to talk about, but hasn't quite worked himself around to it. Which is fine. Taiga can wait. Kuroko lifts one shoulder. “Aida-kantoku wanted to discuss potential practice matches with other teams.”

Taiga lets that one percolate for a little while as he chews. Kuroko's not looking at him, just staring out the window with his mouth pulled down on one side. Not quite unhappy, just resigned. Taiga wonders for a moment what it would be like to always be someone else's shadow. Never wanted for yourself, but just your connections to other people. It sounded lonely. 

“Could be interesting,” he replies, rattling his ice around in his plastic cup. “Hey, did you hear 'bout the club tradition for first-years?”

That breaks Kuroko out of whatever funk he'd put himself into it. He shoots Taiga a small but unguarded smile. “Insofar as a club in its second year can have a 'tradition'. But yes. I had heard.”

“Think she'll make us do it?” Taiga asks just to keep the conversation going and to preempt the distant look he can see creeping back into Kuroko's eyes. That gets him an even stare, though it's marred somewhat by the tiny smile he can tell is tugging at Kuroko's lips. Taiga laughs. “Yeah, okay, she'll totally make us do it.”

“I believe that it is a way of … ensuring our commitment to the team,” Kuroko remarks.

Taiga makes a non-committal sound in the back of his throat while he works his way through his last burger. “Strange way of going about it.”

Kuroko flicks a glance back at him. “I do not think our senpai are much concerned with going about things the traditional way.”

Taiga balls up the last wrapper and adds it to little pile in front of him. “Wouldn't know much about what's the traditional way or not 'round here. Hey. Wanna play a little one-on-one? Maybe see if we can grab a pick-up game?”

He knows he's sprung that one on Kuroko like a sudden riptide in otherwise smooth surfing because of the way it makes Kuroko blink a couple of times and then raise one eyebrow. “Why?”

Taiga sighs at the question. There's so much packed into it that he's not sure where to begin untangling the mess, so he opts for the most obvious. “Because I got most of my homework for the week out of the way and basketball is fun?”

The look he gets is deeply skeptical to the point of insult. He's not sure what makes Kuroko skeptical: the idea that Taiga's gotten his homework finished, or the idea that basketball is fun. He thinks that there's gonna be an argument, but Kuroko eventually gives one his tiny, one-shoulder shrugs. Taiga takes that as an agreement and herds them both out the door despite the cranky look that Kuroko gives him for it. 

At first Taiga thinks about just heading towards the nearest free court, but then on a whim he steers them towards the little court hidden in the maze that is Ikebukoro. It's an idea with all the hallmarks of being a spectacularly poor decision, but he kinda wants to see what the yako brothers make of his new 'shadow.' At best they might have a good idea on what to do about the shadow-spirit Kuroko managed to attach to himself. At worst … well, he doesn't really want to think about what 'at worst' could entail. 

Explosions, possibly.

He's pleased that Kuroko doesn't complain about the distance or the fact that it takes them in the exact opposite direction they need to go to get home. He follows along after Taiga, taking in Taiga's sudden changes in direction without comment, just a raised eyebrow here and there. He wonders, briefly, if Kuroko can actually see ayakashi, but dismisses the idea when the slender boy nearly runs over a kappa, who has to scramble to get out the way. 

Either Kuroko can't see them, or he has completely perfected the oblivious act to a truly enviable degree.

Before they get to the rusted chain-link gate, he tugs Kuroko to one side. “Look, the people who come to this court are …” he kinda loses himself for a second. Now that he's got Kuroko here he's not real sure how the fuck to explain pretty much anything. He's really starting to think that this isn't one his better ideas. Kuroko cocks his head to the side, an expression that Taiga can't quite decipher playing on his lips. Taiga blows out a breath. “They're a little weird.” A lot weird, he mentally revises. “Just … try not to freak out. Okay?”

“I will endeavor to not freak out,” Kuroko agrees with dry amusement. Taiga thinks that he would have made finger quote around 'freak out' except for the fact that it would way too unsubtle for one Kuroko Tetsuya.

'They're good guys,” Taiga tries again. “Just … not what you'd expect.”

“Taaaaiga, are you trying explain us to your little friend?” One of the yako brothers asks as he drapes himself along Taiga's back to peer at Kuroko over Taiga's shoulder. 

“He's made a friend!” chirps the other, clapping his hands in over-acted glee.

“I have friends, assholes,” Taiga grumbles at the pair of them, trying to shake off the one hanging onto his shoulders. 

“You have never brought them around,” says the one across his shoulders. “We thought perhaps you made them up?”

“I didn't bring 'em 'round because you two are the biggest pair of jackasses I have ever met,” he grouses back at them. The twins give him identical patronizing smiles before turning to Kuroko, their smiles sliding into predatory slashes of teeth across their pointy faces. Taiga's impressed at the way Kuroko stands his ground even when the two of them lean down into his personal space, definitely too close for Japanese social norms. 

“So,” says one.

“So,” echoes the other.

“Might I please have your names, if we are to be acquainted?” Kuroko asks, polite as ever, as if he wasn't being crowded against the brick wall by a pair of psychotic foxes. Not that, Taiga reminds himself, Kuroko knows that they were anything other than deeply weird identical twins. 

Kuroko's question derails the brothers. They pull back as one to consider him. The three of them make an amusing tableau as they all try to out-stare each other. Taiga bites down on the inside of his lip when the twins heave a sigh between them. He's strangely proud of Kuroko's flat refusal to be rattled.

“Sei,” says one.

“Rei,” says the other. Neither one appear to be inclined to give anything more than that. Taiga's notes that those are the same names that the twins gave him on the third time he demanded their names. He thinks it might actually be their real ones. 

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Sei, Rei. My name is Kuroko Tetsuya,” Kuroko replies, raising one hand to his chest and smiling softly. The twins turn as if on hinges to regard Taiga with deeply suspicious expressions. Taiga gives them the 'what?' face. 

“He is polite!” announces Rei.

“Far more polite than you!” accuses Sei. They both lean into him until they are all breathing in each other's breath. “You must have tricked him.”

“He is far too nice a boy to be friends with _you_ ,” declares Rei. Taiga puts a hand on each face and shoves them to either side of him to peer at Kuroko who is watching them with slightly widened eyes. 

“Nevermind. They aren't good guys. They're assholes and I don't know why I wanted you to meet them. We can go somewhere else,” he tells Kuroko, keeping a hand on each of their faces while they squawk muffled complaints at him. 

“No,” Kuroko replies, drawing out the vowel. “No, I think it might be … wise to meet Kagami-kun's friends.”

“Are you sure?” Taiga asks, struggling a little bit to keep a hand over both brothers' mouths while they squirm. “They really are the biggest assholes you'll ever meet.”

Rei manages to yank Taiga's hand off him. “Rude!”

“Very rude!” echoes Sei from under Taiga's other hand. 

“I _sincerely_ doubt that,” Kuroko remarks with an oddly pained smile. Taiga just shrugs and then grabs each of the brothers by the napes to propel them towards the courts. They bark complaints at him, but go with nothing more than token resistance. 

“Let's play two-on-two, assholes. Come on,” he says, dragging the twins to the court. 

Sei twists out his grasp as bonelessly as any cat. “I find it very upsetting that you only come seeking our company when you want to play basketball.”

“It is as if that is all you see as us as. Mere opponents for your never-ending hunger for the game,” Rei continues his brother's complaint with twice as much melodrama.

Taiga rolls his eyes so hard he threatens to give himself a headache and throws his bag at one of the benches. “We meet up at a damned _basketball court_ , dumbasses. If you want to gossip we should meet at a cafe for tea and biscuits.”

The brothers regard each other with wide eyes, then pivot to turn those intensely delighted expressions on him. “Would you meet us at a cafe for tea and gossip, Taiga?” Rei asks.

“Oh, _would_ you?” Sei croons with a truly disturbing amount of glee.

“Fuck no,” Taiga snaps and glowers at them both. “Get the damned ball, you pair of abominations.”

“So rude!” Rei declares as he flounces off after the ball. 

Kuroko floats up to stand at his elbow, coughing lightly, but Taiga can see the grin he's trying to cover with his fist. Taiga glowers at him too, just for good measure. “I said they were assholes, didn't I? Pretty sure I did.”

“They are very colourful people, Kagami-kun,” Kuroko replies diplomatically. “This should be an interesting game.”

Taiga sighs, feeling it start somewhere in his toes. Games against the yako brothers are always a nightmare to begin with because the bastards cheat like crazy, use their abilities constantly (“one should always use all their capabilities, Taiga!”), and are in general a pair of obnoxious twerps. And that's when he didn't have someone else to worry about. Why he thought this was gonna be a good idea, he really didn't know. His past self was an idiot.

“Keep your eyes sharp,” he says by way of warning. Kuroko cocks his head, but Taiga doesn't have time to explain because Rei announces the start of the game by just shooting from the three-point line.

“The game,” Rei crows when the basket drops through the net without rattling the chain, “has started, boys.”

Turns out Kuroko can't quite pull off his vanishing trick with the yako. Taiga's not sure if it's because playing two-on-two means he can't ever get out from under at least one pair of watchful eyes to do that little side-step into the Fourth World. Or if it's because the yako can't be fooled by metaphysical slight-of-hand. 

Kuroko's disappearing pass does, however, delight the twins. They make an enormous deal out of the slender boy the first time he pulls it out. They praise him until the tips of Kuroko's ears go ever so slightly pink. Taiga takes pity on him and collars the two foxes. “Stop being assholes to him.”

“We're not!” Rei protests, hanging in Taiga's grasp like so much dead weight.

“It is a very good trick,” Sei proclaims as he struggles to get free. “You must teach it to us!”

“I, uh, I don't think it would work for you?” Kuroko responds, looking slightly dazed. “You need to diminish your own presence until people don't notice you. I'm, um, not sure that you, ah, you could do that?”

“Oooh,” Sei delightedly sighs. “So that's how you manage that step into the Fourth Wo— _hurk_ ”

Taiga shakes Sei to silence him and then says over the resulting cacophony of protests. “I'm sorry. They're weird assholes.”

He ignores the contemplative looks that gets him from both Rei and Kuroko in favor of giving Sei what he hopes is a significant look. Sei, in return, smiles so broadly that Taiga can see both sets of his canines. It's an alarming sight. Taiga lets him go before Sei can either light him on fire with foxfire or bite his hand off. 

Sei and Rei exchange glances that Taiga can't decipher and then sigh in unison. Rei pats his shoulder while Sei ruffles his hair. “You are so very rude,” Sei comments.

“You are lucky that we like you,” Rei says. “Because you are very foolish.”

Sei slings an arm around Kuroko, who regards him with an expression of faint alarm. “And that we like your little friend, who is so polite.”

“We can talk about this _later_ ,” Taiga says, hitting the 't' on 'later' hard enough to clack his teeth together. He tosses the ball to Rei. “Let's play.”

“Oh, oh, oh, are we going to gossip?!” Rei asks with delight, but his eyes are calculating. 

Taiga wishes, not for the first time, that he could rewind time to erase the things he says. “Yeah, sure. _Later._ ”

The rest of the game goes much as games with Kuroko always go—weird, confusing, and with them winning for reasons that defy logic, physics, and the actual rules of the game. The twins helpfully cleanse the ball with foxfire when they notice Kuroko's little tendrils of darkness clinging to it. The first time Sei does it he clucks his tongue disapprovingly at Kuroko, earning him one of the boy's politely confused expressions. Kuroko doesn't seem to notice the foxfire, Taiga's on the fly exorcisms of the twins' tricks, or really anything that would suggest that he was anything other than a normal human boy.

Which is weird. The fact that Taiga finds the idea of Kuroko being perfectly normal weirder than him being something … else makes him want to beat his head against a wall, but there it is. 

At the end of the game Rei contrives to wrap himself around Taiga, nuzzling against his shoulder as if he were a cat rather than a fox. “You have played basketball and even won! And yet you look as if your world is collapsing.”

Taiga lets Rei hang off him like a barnacle made of teenaged fox-spirit just to enjoy the grounding warmth of him for a moment. Then he gets himself back together. Work to be done, blah, blah, blah. “It's been a long day.”

Kuroko not so much floats over to where they are as staggers. He looks drained to the point that Taiga seriously thinks about dragging him back to his apartment and feeding him soup until the haggard look in his eyes goes away. “We have played a lot of basketball today. I wonder if Aida-kantoku would be pleased at the extra training or irritated.”

Taiga turns that one over in his head because he honestly hadn't thought about how their tiny coach with her meticulous training regimes would feel about outside games. He fishes a water bottle of his bag and hands it to Kuroko. “Pleased, I think? We don't have any competitive games coming up for a bit.”

Kuroko accepts the water bottle, drains half of it and then dumps the remainder over his head. “Let us hope for pleased,” he remarks as he shakes the excess water from his head, making Rei dance back to avoid getting splattered. “The alternative is alarming to consider.”

Taiga winces. “No shit. So, home?”

“That would be, I think, best,” Kuroko agrees. 

–

It's not until they've all said their goodbyes and Taiga is putting together his lunch for the next day that it dawns on him that he never did manage to pry whatever had been eating at Kuroko out of him. The realization makes him swear for a little bit. Because, god dammit, the kid is the sneakiest little shit he's ever met. And he knows Coyote.

He makes the blargh face at his bento box in general frustration and then packs it into the fridge. It's only when he's mostly through doing the dishes that he notices the very persistent tapping against a window. Taiga edges into the living room of his apartment. It takes a long moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark, but as he peers around the room he notices the faint lights moving outside the window. 

Swearing softly, he pops open the window and lifts the screen. “Get in here, you blithering idiots.”

Sei eels through through the open window to pad about his apartment with open delight. Rei takes more time, dawdling around the edge of the window until Taiga reaches through and grabs him by scruff of his furry neck. It's easier for Rei to contrive to look cute and harmless in his fox form as he hangs from Taiga's grasp. 

“What do you to want?” he grumbles at them, though he can already guess.

“You said that we could gossip,” chirps Sei as he hops up onto the table daintily. “You said we could gossip later.”

Sei's wide grin is no less intimidating in his fox form than it is in his human one. Still entirely too many teeth for one mouth to contain. Taiga sighs hard enough that it sets Rei swinging in his grasp. “This is later,” Rei says soothingly. “Your polite little friend is gone and now it is later. So now we can gossip.”

“You two are way too excited about the idea of gossiping,” he informs them as he lets Rei gently drop to the ground. “And now it's _late_ , not later.”

This does not appear to dissuade either one of them. Rei hops onto the table to join his brother. They both regard him with delighted toothy, canine smiles. Taiga is going to have permanent bad associations because of this. He just knows it. He drops into a sulky cross-legged seat in front of them and makes the little 'so talk' gesture.

“Your polite little friend is very strange, Taiga,” Sei comments. Taiga's about to make a flip comment in reply, but the brothers are regarding him with serious expressions—or as serious as their current forms will allow. “He should not have been able to see us.”

“We were not manifesting,” Rei continues. “But he could see us. And interact with us.”

“But he couldn't see anything else,” Sei notes. Which was going to be Taiga's question. He frowns at the pair of them. He dislikes it when they read his questions before he gets the chance to actually voice them. “That is very odd.”

“More weird or less weird than whatever shadow thing he has riding him?” Taiga asks, slouching against the couch. 

The pair of them sit contemplating this when Sei jerks his head to the left, nostrils flaring. “What is that smell?”

“Please don't make me any more paranoid than I already am,” Taiga begs, but he obediently sniffs the air as well. For all the good that it will do him compared to their noses.

Rei tilts his head to the right. “Incense?”

“Oh, I used some sage a couple of days of ago,” Taiga realizes. “That's probably what you smell.”

“Sage?” Rei queries, wrapping his tail around his front paws. “What is sage?”

Taiga blinks. Opens his mouth and then closes it with a shrug. “You know, _ts'ah_ , white sage. The stuff that you make smudge sticks out of and use for rituals.”

“Ahahahaha haa, _atsilì_ , you know that _ts'ah_ does not grow where my paws have not touched the ground! They will not know it!” Coyote's nightmare laugh drives Rei into hiding in Taiga's lap, while Sei goes stiff-legged with rage and terror on the table. 

“Where are you?” Sei growl-yips, head down, tail straight back and bottle-brush bushy. “What are you? You are not welcome here, youkai, begone before I cleanse you!”

Taiga grabs Sei and bundles him into his arms as Coyote's head—and only his head—manifests out of the gathering shadows in his living room. Coyote looms over them, tilting his head to one side so he can fix the three of them with one yellow-red eye. Rei burrows deeper into Taiga's lap, and he can feel the little fox tremble hard enough that it shakes them both. Sei writhes in Taiga's arms, trying to bare his teeth at Coyote's slowly manifesting form.

“Haha haah,” Coyote laughs as he turns his head, now big enough to barely fit inside Taiga's living room. “ _You_ will cleanse _me_ , little one?”

“That's a new trick, Coyote,” Taiga says, hoping against hope to distract the elder-god. “I didn't think you liked to get your paws wet.”

Coyote's grin is a veritable saw of teeth that stretches his snout to unreal proportions. “And now I do not have to! I can go anywhere true _ts'ah_ has been used as it should be.”

It takes Taiga a minute to work that one out and then he wants to beat his head against the table. He should have seen this one coming. He really, really, really should've. He nods slowly and sighs, counting to ten in his head. “That is, indeed, a mighty gift you have given me, Coyote.”

For a moment the air drags at his skin like it was being sucked through a funnel, there's a soft pop, and then Coyote is sitting before him on the table where the twins had been. He barely fits, but he still contrives to look dainty and delicate, for all his delighted smile shows a mouth made of nothing but very sharp teeth. Coyote utters a delighted yip and prances on the table, nearly frisking like a puppy.

“Ahahaha haaah, I had not been sure, _atsilì_ , if this would work. If your strength would hold true. But look, here I am,” Coyote crows. “Drawn by the strength of your desire to see me. And here I am.”

“You are using my strength to come to Japan?” Taiga echoes in dazed disbelief. 

Coyote flops across the table, rolling on it as if he had found week-old road kill. “Projection, _atsilì_ , through Fourth World from my place to yours. Called and anchored by you.” Coyote rolls onto his back and regards Taiga with his head hanging upside down off the table. “Ah! You are my very favorite shaman. So much like your mother.”

“I …” Taiga stumbles to halt before he even gets started. He looks down at the two little foxes currently trying to make themselves look very small indeed, and then back at Coyote, and then shakes his head. “I don't even know where to start with that.”

“No, you do not,” Coyote agrees as he flips back onto his belly. “So let us not worry about this, _atsilì_ ,” he says and waves one paw in dismissal. “Let us worry about your little friend for whom you are making medicine, yes?”

Taiga wants to protest. He wants to ask about a bazillion questions, but given his guest's mercurial temper he knows better than to push it. “Do you have an idea of what he is being ridden by?”

Coyote sits up and wraps his tail around his forepaws. “I do not. Not without seeing your friend for myself. You could bring him here, eh, but I think perhaps you want to do something before that.” Coyote makes a tsking sound in the back of his throat. “So hasty.”

“I was making pouches for the entire team,” Taiga replies cautiously, shifting the twins so that they are more comfortably gathered to him. Coyote notices, of course, and bares his teeth at them in a mockery of a reassuring smile. “Should I bead them?”

That gets him a scornful sound that's so reminiscent of Mrs. Calenza that Taiga feels a sudden pang of homesickness. “Do you want to give them something that will work or just some little baubles?”

“Something that will work,” he says with a sigh.

“Then you know the answer,” Coyote replies, though his voice is gentler than it's been since he first manifested out of the shadows. Taiga reaches out to rub along Coyote's jaw, the way he always does, and startles when his hand passes through the elder-god, making his form go hazy for a moment. “Merely a projection, _atsilì_ , nothing more than shadows in the dark.”

Taiga can't say why that makes his heart and mouth both twist. “Oh.”

Coyote laughs as his form begins to unravel back into the inky darkness of the living room. “Does the idea of beading distress you so? Think of it as practice in patience!”

“I get my practice in patience from you, _ánaaì_ ,” Taiga replies, shaking off the aching feeling of homesickness. For a moment the shadows swirl again into Coyote's head formed massive in Taiga's living room and his laughter shakes the little room. Then the elder-god is gone with nothing but the faint sent of sage in his wake.

“If you do not mind muchly,” comes Rei's voice from his lap, “I would very much like to stay with you this evening and _not_ go back out into the dark.”


	4. I Knew You Were Trouble When You Walked In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hi, Kise.

The smell of grilling fish seduces Taiga into wakefulness. It's a resentful wakefulness, but his stomach teams up with the responsible bits of his brain to prod him towards at least kicking off the covers. The furry body draped over his stomach grumbles in protest. He prods it without opening his eyes, “Stop whining, Coyote. Time to get up.”

That earns him a nip to his fingers, making him yelp, before Rei's sleepily annoyed voice drags him all the way out of his sleepy haze, “I am not Coyote, as I am not some sort of monster.”

Taiga sits up, spilling Rei onto his futon. The little fox shakes himself all over before curling back up into a ball with his back to Taiga. He stares at the fuzzy body, trying to get the world to line back up again. He scrubs his hands over his eyes, feeling that sense of dislocation that occasionally follows him when he wakes up from deep sleep. Always unsettling when he wakes up thinking he's in one country only to find he's in an entirely different one. 

“He is right, brother mine, it is time to get up,” Sei says from the doorway. Taiga's eyebrows try to join his hairline as he takes in the sight of Sei in an apron with a ladle held in one hand and the other on his hip as he glares at his twin. Sei makes a face at Taiga. “My apologies, he's always such a brat in the mornings.”

“Um,” Taiga says eloquently.

“I made breakfast,” Sei says, blithely ignoring Taiga's fish impression. “Despite the fact that you have precisely nothing in your kitchen to make it.”

Taiga's mouth snaps closed and he narrows his eyes at the elder twin. If there's one thing that Taiga keeps meticulous track of, it's his grocery supply and his food allowance. And he does not appreciate any threats to either. “Last I was in my kitchen, meaning _last night_ , I had everything to make breakfast.” 

Sei reaches down to catch his brother by the scruff of his neck and sniffs. “You had no fish, little rice, no pickled vegetables, and no miso. You had nothing. I had to go to the market. You are welcome, by the way, and I won't ask you repay me as this is in thanks for hosting us last night.”

With that and a flounce, Sei walks out of Taiga's bedroom with his brother swinging from one fist like a stuffed toy. 

Taiga blinks, rubs the back of his head, and then hauls himself out his futon. He wonders briefly if this would be his new normal. A constant stream of _ayakashi_ , astral projections of monster-gods, and metaphysical weirdness. So much for having a normal high school life. 

“All I want to do is play basketball and not die,” he tells the medicine pouches where they sit still lined up on his windowsill. It seems like a simple request to him. 

“Setting your desires for the future low such that you avoid disappointment?” Rei asks as he leans against the door jam in human form. He flashes Taiga a cheeky smile and then saunters next to Taiga to peer at the medicine pouches. “Is this what that monster meant when he said you were making medicine?”

Taiga swats Rei's hand from the pouches. “Coyote's a god, not a monster, and yes. These are what he was talking about.”

“They don't look like much,” Rei says skeptically. “They don't feel like much either.”

“I'm not finished with 'em,” he retorts, feeling stung. “They need beading before they're done. That takes a lotta time.”

Rei shoots him a sidelong glance. “What do you mean when you say that thing last night is a god?”

Taiga waves one hand. “Don't play dumb. I know you have gods like him in Japan too. _Kunitsu-kami_. Land gods.”

There's a long pause while Rei considers him through narrowed eyes. “And what is his territory?”

That stumps Taiga for a moment. He crosses his arms over his chest while he thinks about it. “I'm not sure? Most of the Southwest. Definitely all of the Mojave and out to Colorado. Maybe even all of the Plains. Not further North up the coast than maybe San Francisco, though. That's where Raven's territory starts, and he's a pissy bastard.” Taiga shudders from the memory of the one time he'd gone up to Seattle and everywhere he went there had been massive black birds watching him with even darker eyes. Raven had definitely not appreciated Taiga's presence for all the god had been polite about it. 

“And how big a territory would that be?” Sei asks, suddenly appearing behind them. 

“Jesus, don't do that,” Taiga responds, clutching at his chest where his heart had seized from shock. He expects the brothers to chortle over that, but they both continue to watch him with serious eyes and flat mouths. “Fuck, I don't know. Couple thousand miles?”

“This god is the _kunitsu-kami_ of a couple of thousand of miles,” Sei repeats flatly.

Taiga rubs at his mouth. “I'm not sure if _kunitsu-kami_ is exactly the right way to think about him. He's a god that a lot of tribes from the southwest of the country respect. But he shows up in the stories of the Lakota Sioux as well. Even in some of the Iroquois stories and they are all the way out on the East Coast.”

The brothers share a long, silent look between themselves that Taiga has some trouble deciphering before turning to eye him with equal parts skepticism and wonder. “This Coyote, he is an _amatsu-kami_ ,” Rei whispers. His brother rubs a comforting hand along his arm. “You have a _heavenly deity_ personally interested in you?” Rei peers at him intently. “How are you not insane?”

“I have no fucking clue,” Taiga replies dryly. “But I don't think that Coyote is exactly an _amatsu-kami_. Most of the tribes don't worship him. They just … leave him gifts and stuff so he won't fuck with them. Sometimes if you catch him in the right mood he might do you favors.”

Sei snorts. “That's the exact definition of an _amatsu-kami_. Well, if your Coyote is a heavenly deity there's nothing to be done about it. Come eat the breakfast that I have so kindly prepared for you.”

Taiga blinks at Sei's sudden shift in attitude and turns a questioning look at Rei, who sighs in defeat. “My brother is right. There is nothing to be done about it. Either your Coyote will be helpful, or not, as he decides.”

“That's kinda how it's always been,” Taiga agrees. Rei cocks his head to the side, curious. Taiga waves his hands around vaguely. “He started hangin' around right after my mom got sick and kinda … never left.”

Rei shakes his head. “I cannot tell if you are very fortunate or very cursed,” he says thoughtfully. Taiga sighs, because on the list of things he _doesn't_ need to be told... “But then that is always the way with the ones the gods touch.” Rei pokes one of the medicine pouches. “Though, if he says that you must bead these things, then it would be wise to start that sooner rather than later.”

Taiga just makes a face at him.

–

Breakfast with the _yako_ brothers leaves Taiga with a general feeling of goodwill and high spirits. It'd been far too long since he'd last eaten a meal with company—Kuroko ambushing him at the burger joint notwithstanding. He manages to hold onto his good mood all the way through classes, despite his literature teacher's deeply sarcastic remarks about his lack knowledge of the classics, and into practice. He all but hums to himself as he makes his way to the gym.

His captain turns a suspicious eye over him. “Between her skipping,” Hyuuga comments, “and your humming, I'm wondering just how painfully we are all going to die.”

Taiga feels like he must have made some sort of catastrophic translation error in that sentence, but every alternative translation he can think of is worse. As he's trying to puzzle out whether his senpai are being strange(r) or he's having a critical language failure, Aida comes skipping into the gym. 

Her cheeks are rosy. Her smile bright and cheerful. Her laughter a joyful sound. His senpai draw away from her as one, huddling behind Hyuuga. Their captain regards her with an expression caught between dread and amusement. “What terrible thing did you think up now?”

Aida giggles and swats his arm with one hand. The upperclassmen collectively draw even further away. Taiga thinks that Koganei and Tsuchida might actually be clutching each other. “As if I would do something terrible. Be happy! I've arranged an outside practice match for you. You were saying that playing practice games against each other and doing drills was getting boring.”

“I said no such thing,” Hyuuga replies flatly. 

Aida makes a little gesture like she's brushing away dust. “Oh, you were thinking it.”

“Uh-huh,” Hyuuga sighs. “Against who?”

She jams her fists against her hips, feet braced at hip distance, and beams up at Hyuuga. “Kaijo! In three days. This is a big get because they're a nationally ranked team _and_ they have one of the Miracles. It'll be excellent training!”

Taiga tries to swallow his laughter because the pair of them make a hilarious picture: Aida being so delighted with herself that she practically sparkles as she beams and Hyuuga looking like a man about to be led before the firing squad. All his captain needs is the blindfold and a cigarette. He figures he must've been unsuccessful in keeping it in because Aida swings around to turn that mega-watt smile on him. 

“See! Kagami-kun is happy,” she says, pointing to him.

“Because he doesn't know any better,” Hyuuga snaps back at her. “Because he's an idiot.”

“Nah, Coach is right. Playing against a strong team will be good,” he retorts—mostly because he's feeling stung about the idiot comment. Aida sparkles at him. “That's the entire point of playing the game, right? To have strong opponents.”

His captain gives him a look that strongly suggests that Hyuuga would like to strangle him until the very last breath escaped him, but is manfully restraining himself. His coach, on the other hand, continues to sparkle at him. Taiga makes a snap decision and decides that making Coach Aida happy trumps anything that Hyuuga might want from him. “So, is there anything that you want us to do to prepare?”

He swears Aida has hearts floating about her at his question, while Hyuuga looks like he trying to murder him with his mind. “Yes! Kaijo really is a very strong team, with a much stronger inside defense than we are used to, so we'll be doing sets of …”

Taiga tunes out a little bit as she rattles off their increased training regime for the next couple of days in favor of studying Kuroko, who has gone still and quiet. Taiga's pretty sure that he would have completed dropped off everyone's radar if it weren't for the fact that Taiga's got preternatural senses and is, by now, pretty much constantly tuned to the channel of Kuroko Tetsuya and all his attendant weirdness. 

Kuroko has let himself be shuffled to the back of the group where he stands chewing in his bottom lip. Taiga's positive that if Kuroko had any idea he was being watched he wouldn't allow that particular tell. The kid looks disturbed, as if a particularly nasty realization has just dawned on him that he can't shake himself loose from. Taiga's considering slinging an arm around him to jar him out of whatever funk he's managed to drag himself down into this time when a ruckus at the entry to the gym draws everyone's attention.

There's a particular noise that large groups of Japanese girls make when they've found something exciting, Taiga has found, a sort of high-pitched, modulating squeal that threatens the molecular cohesion of most glass. In fact, he's pretty sure that the Japanese could use large numbers of excited Japanese girls as some sort of sound weapon. And apparently something _very_ exciting at the entry to the gym has every girl in the school's attention. 

As one the team turns to regard the entryway into their normally quiet gym with matched expressions of confused alarm. Then Aida makes a noise suspiciously like a growl. Taiga slaps a hand over his mouth to keep himself from laughing at his coach's expression as she marches to the door—shoulders back, chin up, eyes blazing with righteous irritation. 

Kuroko, he notices, has begun to frown something vicious. 

“Ah, I'm so so~rry,” sings out a voice that makes all the girls squeal in earsplitting unison, “but I'm really just here to say hello to an old friend.”

The press of girls opens up enough to reveal a rangy blond in a truly terrible gray suit. Taiga's no fashion model, but he's pretty sure that it's something that should be burned, not worn out and about. The blond pivots on one heel and then leans down into Aida's personal space, eyes twinkling, smile wide and charming. “It's okay, right? Just a couple of minutes.”

Taiga's impressed when his coach doesn't smack the blond straight into next week, though the way her left eye starts twitching suggests that she dearly wants to. “We are in the middle of practice. You can wait until we are finished. Outside.”

The blond slaps his hands together in a playful prayer pose and cocks his head to the side. “It'll be so fast you won't even notice he's gone.”

Then he winks at her.

Several things happen very quickly. Hyuuga grabs their coach's hand before it can connect with blond's silly head. The blond jumps backwards with fox-like grace. And Kuroko steps forward and clears his throat quietly: “Kise-kun.”

“Kurokocchi!” The blond dives around Aida, who hisses at him like an enraged cat, (Hyuuga catches her other arm and pulls her backward, whispering very fast in her ear), and drapes himself over Kuroko like a living shawl. “I missed you so much!” 

Kuroko's mouth goes flat and his eyes blank. Taiga notices that shadow tendrils start to waft off him like steam, and makes an educated guess that this Kise was 1) one of the Generation of Miracles, and 2) definitely on Kuroko's shit list. “Did you.”

Kise apparently has some self-preservation instincts, because he lets go of Kuroko and spins around in front of the other boy with his hands clasped behind his back in pose that makes all the girls still clustered in the entry shriek in delight. “Well, when you disappeared after the tournament without saying anything to anyone, I was so worried!”

“Were you.” Taiga thinks it's kinda funny the way that Kuroko's voice manages to go as flat as his mouth. 

“And then I heard you were at Seirin, and I was so surprised!” Kise chatters on, like he doesn't notice Kuroko's irritation. “I came to ask you to come to Kaijo. Come play with me, Tetsuya. Together we can totally beat _all_ of 'em.”

Taiga leans back to watch Kuroko process that. The rest of the team seems completely focused on Kise and his ridiculousness, but Taiga's more interested in what Kuroko does with that declaration. For the first time since the blond had stepped into the gym, he seems completely earnest as he watches his former teammate's face. Taiga wonders if that's the sort of acknowledgment that Kuroko's looking for from his former team—from the (in)famous Generation of Miracles. 

Kuroko places his hands neatly on his upper thighs and does a precise bow of apology (but the angle suggests not _that_ apologetic) and says, “I must regretfully decline your invitation, Kise-kun.”

Kise falls over himself in exaggerated surprise, and then clasps both hands over his heart in distressed shock. “Kurokocchi! You can't mean to stay here! It's not like you can find a strong light here for you to be your best shadow. C'mon, you know I'll be the best light for you.”

Taiga frowns at that little announcement. Precisely where the fuck did this guy get off assuming that Kuroko should continue to sacrifice his own game? The fact that Kuroko's aura has gone completely full of black shadow tendrils that pulse and curl over him does not make Taiga feel any better about Kise and his fuckery. 

Kuroko makes his polite little bow again while their coach is positively spitting in fury where Hyuuga restrains her. “I must apologize, but I have already promised Kagami-kun that I would make him the best in Japan.”

Taiga rolls his eyes at that little counter-declaration, because goddammit, the kid apparently does not listen, but takes that his cue. He dribbles the ball loudly, making sure it hits the floor with a resounding smack with each beat. He expects Kise to do one of his dancing spins over to him, but Kise just turns slowly, head down and tilted slightly to the side, to eye him through the fall of his hair. Taiga arches an eyebrow at the look in the blond's gold eyes—predatory and possessive. 

“I thought,” Taiga says to Kuroko without taking his eyes off Kise, “that we had discussed this? We will be the best in Japan.”

Kuroko makes a small frustrated noise. Taiga's not sure if it's because he's throwing Kuroko's words from the earlier day back at him, or because he's rejecting—again—the idea of Kuroko being a shadow. Anyone's shadow. He favors Kise with a sharp smile of his own, feeling the corners of his grin curling up to show off his canines. “Wanna play a game?”

That makes the blond lean back to study him, starting with the top of his head and ending with his Nikes. Then Kise turns to Kuroko to do the same to him. Then sticks his hands on hips and cocks his head to the side before saying: “Really, Kurokocchi, really?”

It means something between the two of them because it makes Kuroko's nostrils flare, and Taiga decides it's time to intervene before the kid does something drastic. Like try to jijutsu Kise, which might be funny, but would probably end in tears. Taiga doesn't normally use any of his spiritual power for playing basketball (unless he's playing with the _yako_ brothers because they _cheat_ ), but now he thinks it's time to be a little flashy.

He tugs on his necklace, feeling Coyote's tooth where it hangs heavy next to Tatsuya's ring, and uses that heaviness of the tooth—like a weight pulling on the fabric of the world—as a center. Coyote's tooth could cut anything, any line that could be found to bind. Taiga didn't need to cut the line between the ball and the hoop where it wanted to go, he just needed to make that path a little bit more… probable.

Taiga lets himself go loose and slack, sliding into a floating feeling that's just two heartbeats before a faint, and dribbles the ball once, twice, three times, before popping it up and over his shoulder. He lets the thrumming power of Coyote's tooth pulse through him to guide the ball where it already wants to go. When the ball follows that line through the hoop without even a whisper against the net, Kise shifts to give him a long look, mouth flat for once, eyes narrowed into golden slits. He favors Kise with a lazy, sharp-toothed smile—Coyote's smile on a human face—and says again, “Wanna play?”

That gets Taiga a slight rueful smile from the blond, like he's done something both endearing and painful. Kise huffs a laugh as he sheds his suit jacket. “I mean, _really_ , Tetsuya.”

Kuroko opens his mouth to say something, object maybe, but Kise already has his hands on the ball—and wait, what? Taiga's hard pressed to match the burst of speed that the lanky blond puts on as he drives towards the opposite end of the court.

He thinks that it must be his imagination, but for a second Kise glows gold. It's like the exact opposite of Kuroko's shadow trick. It's hard to keep his attention on the ball and off those golden eyes and smirking mouth. Kise burns with an intensity that demands everyone's complete attention. And yeah, Taiga could see how the pair of Kise and Kuroko could make a deadly team if the two of them wanted.

Taiga matches the blond move for move, but after his little stunt earlier, he's running a little lightheaded. Taiga manages to block two of Kise's attempted dunks, but as they face off at the free-throw line, watching each other for the smallest of tells, he's the one panting and Kise still looks pretty as a picture.

It's enough to make a person _seriously_ hate the guy. 

He blocks Kise's feint to the left and preps to steal the ball and make his own drive to the other side of the court, when Kise fades back—soft as falling cherry blossoms—and just sinks a beautiful shot into the hoop. And that's it. That's the game. Kise favors him with a thoughtful smile, like Taiga's a puzzle that he hasn't quite solved. The blond sticks his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. 

“Not yet, Kurokocchi,” he says without taking his eyes off Taiga. His smile slips into something faintly sad and yet intensely condescending. Taiga's torn between wanting to give the guy a hug and wanting to punch him in the mouth. He also notes that Kise still has a faint golden glow to him. Taiga would write it off as just a trick of the light if it weren't for the fact that weird shit follows Kuroko around like a puppy. “I'm the weakest of all of them and he can't even match me. Come to Kaijo, Tetsuya, you know it'll be better.”

Taiga kinda loses the train of the conversation as he studies Kise's aura. As Kuroko murmurs some polite little insult and Coach Aida snarls a challenge that soft golden light around Kise slowly solidifies around him, much the same way the shadows had around Kuroko during that first game. Taiga can't even find it in himself to be surprised when that light coalesces into a slender form with nine graceful tails. As Kise continues to make his smug declarations, the kitsune twines around him, draping herself over him like a solicitous lover, and turns to regard Taiga over the blond's shoulders. 

They stare each other for a long breath and then the kitsune lifts one delicate hand to pull her left eye down and stick her tongue out at him. Taiga bursts out laughing before he can control himself, because honestly, what the fuck?

His entire team plus Kise turn to regard him like he had just completely lost his god damned mind, which, fair enough. He was beginning to think that might be the case. It takes him a little bit to get himself back under control because the kitsune's deeply offended face at his laughter is just the best thing. Taiga drags his hair back as he chuckles to himself. So much for normal; _sayonara_ to a typical high school existence. Either he's going to laugh himself sick or he's going to beat his head against a wall until he hits unconsciousness. 

Taiga blows out the remaining laugh like a sigh and makes some sort of justification about just being happy to have strong opponents. The kitsune blows him a raspberry. He responds by showing her all of his teeth. 

–

The rest of the team treats him like he's nuts for the remainder of practice—but it's an affectionate sort of bemusement. Kuroko in particular seems tolerantly exasperated by his little one-on-one with Kise and subsequent outburst. Coach Aida declares that if he has enough energy to be having solo matches, then he has enough energy for a triple training menu, so he's walking stiff and aching like an old man as he drags himself back to his apartment.

Taiga thinks briefly about dropping into the little street court that the yako brothers like to hang around, but he's too tired to deal with more fox bullshit of any kind. 

The slog home is long enough for the ache in his muscles to really set in—god damn, Coach Aida's a demon in the form of a girl—and for him to draw up a plan of action for the next couple of days. Kitsune possessed or not, Kise's got some serious skills that are going to be a problem. Losing isn't really an option now that Kuroko has all but declared war on his entire former team. Taiga didn't want to think about what losing a game, even a practice game, would do to Kuroko's delicate sense of self-esteem, much less what would happen with the shadowspirit riding him. 

He kinda wonders what precisely the fuck had happened at Teikou that he's now at two out of two possessed Miracles thus far. Taiga's also not really looking forward to meeting the rest of them if youkai/spirit possession and general fuckery are their collective normal. 

With that delightful line of thought rattling around his head, Taiga putters about his kitchen—more to give his hands something to do while he runs through his mental list of shit to do than out of any real desire for food. He sincerely doubts that he'll be able to raise his personal skills to Kise's level, assuming that level isn't being boosted by the kitsune hanging off him, inside the three days they had before the practice game. He'll just have to hope for a very good day personally—and that the upperclassmen have tricks of their own.

What he can do, however, is shut down that fox possessing Kise, or at least make things much more complicated for her. It just means beading ten medicine pouches inside three days. Right. No problem. Taiga gently smacks his forehead against the refrigerator door. “Fuck my life.” 

– 

When the day of their practice game finally rolls around, Taiga's high-strung and jittery from lack of sleep and too much coffee. He normally doesn't drink that shit, but beading ten medicine pouches inside three days required way more focus and evenings spent way past his bedtime than he could handle without the help of chemicals. His eyes are bloodshot and his hands a mess of tiny little pinpricks where he kept stabbing himself over and over with the needle, but the pouches sit in his backpack all beaded up and thrumming with power. 

He'd originally through to bead each of them with custom designs, but gave that up for a crazy ass plan after getting through Coach Aida's. It'd been enough work just to get the thunder symbols on all of them. And if each little pouch has an even tinier beaded figure of Coyote on the back flaps, well, not like anyone in Japan would know what it is. 

It probably isn't such a hot idea to give his entire team medicine pouches with Coyote on them—who knows what the god of Chaos thinks is good medicine—but it had felt right to bead the little figure onto the backs. Like asking Coyote to watch the places they couldn't. Taiga didn't think it would hurt at least. 

Probably.

“Kagami-kun?” Kuroko's soft voice snaps him back to the present with a jerk. He blinks down at his teammate, feeling slightly disconcerted, like he can't quite get his two realities to line up with each other. He scrubs his hand over his face while Kuroko regards him with faintly amused exasperation. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Taiga mumbles. “Just a little tired is all. Didn't get much sleep before the game.”

Kuroko flashes him a quick smile that is, for once, bare of any bitterness or barely veiled edges. “Kagami-kun is like an elementary school student, too excited to sleep?”

Taiga laughs slightly and jostles Kuroko with his shoulder. “Jerk. No. Just stayed up to finish some... good luck charms.”

That startles a laugh out of Kuroko—a surprised burst of sound that leaves him bright-eyed and as close to beaming as Taiga had ever seen him. “Kagami-kun _is_ an elementary school student! You made good luck charms?”

That draws the attention of the second years, who crowd around them, slinging surprisingly companionable arms around Kuroko, who looks both surprised and pleased by it. Koganei presses right into Taiga's personal space, so close that Taiga backs up on instinct, only to run into the solid wall of Mitobe's body. “ _You_ made good luck charms?” Koganei demands.

Taiga sighs and then slings his bag around his body to fish out the medicine pouches. The rest of the team jostle and rough house around him, high spirits and nerves expressing through horseplay and bravado. As Coach Aida pushes her way through her team, she gives him a look that he counts as two parts affectionate and one part going-to-murder-something. “What are you idiots doing? We have a game to go play.”

“I made good luck charms. It's … kinda traditional in the States,” Taiga explains. A small white lie, if he had ever presented any of his team with just normal good luck charms he never would've lived it down. Though, in California, more than a few would recognize a medicine pouch and would then be suspicious for entirely different reasons.

His coach accepts one delicately, turning it over in her hands. Her brow knits and she gives him a skeptical look. “You made these?”

“Yes?” Like, what else would he have done? Not like you could go out on the street in Japan and buy them. “Like, if it's weird or something then you don't have to take them.”

Aida pulls the little medicine pouch away from his reaching fingers and shakes her head. “No, it's just … unusual for a boy to be, um.”

“You're really _girly_ for such a big dude!” chirps Koganei. Taiga glowers at him and is gratified when both Coach Aida and his captain swat the back of his head. Mitobe waits until Koganei has finished rubbing at his head to go for a hat trick, making Koganei squawk at the betrayal.

“Every time I try to sew anything I sew myself to it,” Aida says, still a trifle tart and fixing Koganei with a sharp look. “You will have to show me how to do it.”

“Uh, sure,” Taiga replies, bemused, but he's pleased when the rest of the team takes a medicine pouch with no further commentary. That was, Taiga reflected, sort of the way of things for the Seirin team. Where Aida Riko pointed, they marched. (And if they didn't, their captain would drag them.) “It's not actually hard, just kinda a pain in the ass.”

“And yet you went and did this for us?” his coach asks with a deceptively light tone. Taiga shoots her a sidelong look only to find her watching him with cool, thoughtful eyes. He wonders at what sort of picture of him she's putting together in that alarmingly observant head of hers. She blinks, slow and deliberate like a cat, and then smiles at him, blindly sunny. “Well. Thank you.”

Taiga bites back a sigh. One day, a day coming soon, his coach is gonna corner him and all those questions she's got filed away will come due. The rest of the team seems to take that as a signal to make an embarrassingly big deal out of the pouches. Even Kuroko manages to sound perfectly sincere, if a little wondering, with his gratitude. Taiga rubs at the back of his neck, feeling his cheeks heat. “It's not that big a deal.”

“Who taught you to make them?” Aida asks, tone still light and friendly as she steers them towards the buses. “Or is it something everyone learns in America, like origami?”

Taiga laughs slightly at the idea of anyone learning Native crafts in school, and then bites off the laugh when it sounds bitter even to him. Aida's studying him with contemplative look, like he's just handed her a missing piece of a puzzle. “My mom taught me. And, no, most people don't learn how.”

He tries to will that to be the end of the conversation, because the subject of his mother and anything to related to Navajo traditions still hurt like a sonuvabitch. He almost thinks that he's managed to head his coach off at the pass by being surly and uncommunicative, but right as he's about to zone out while watching the traffic move past the bus window, Aida clears her throat. “Your mother isn't Japanese?”

Taiga glances down at her and then goes back to staring out the window. “She wasn't. No.”

“So you're a half?” Koganei asks, bright and oblivious. “I thought all halfs were like seven feet tall and blond. Well, at least you got the height. Mitobe, stop stepping on me!”

It takes a few moments of breathing through his nose and out his mouth for the faint tinge of red to fade from his vision. He takes another couple of grounding breaths just to be on the safe side. “My mom was Navajo—Native American.”

Aida shifts next to him and reaches up to pat his arm. When he looks back down at his coach, he notes her mouth has the same hard line as his as she watches the traffic. There's a tightness to the set of her shoulders and in the line between her brows that makes him wonder who his coach has lost. Then she clears her throat in the way that suggests all good basketball players need to shut the fuck up before their coach lovingly strangles them all. “We're almost at Kaijo. Time to focus.”

The impending game, for all it's just a practice game, sufficiently derails the rest of the team. Taiga lets the anticipation of the game—even if it is against yet another damned fox—chase the reflexive sorrow and rage that any mention of his mother always brought up out of his system. And if he notices Coach Aida sticking close to him while they navigate their way to Kaijo's completely ridiculous campus, he does them both the mercy of pretending that it's because of his returnee-confusion and nothing else.


	5. Intertribal No. 1

It doesn't take long for Kise to find them. Taiga thinks that maybe the blond has some sort of preternatural homing sense for Kuroko, because he makes a straight line for their sixth man, completely ignoring the flat, unhappy glare that earns him. Taiga hovers in a sort of aimless helplessness as Kise drapes himself all over Kuroko, chattering at high speed despite Kuroko's monosyllabic responses and deeply displeased body language. Taiga's not sure if Kise is actually as oblivious as he appears or just engaging in a really convoluted social combat. 

Regardless of the blond's intentions, Kuroko expression grows darker and darker until Taiga's seriously contemplating grabbing Kise by the back of his neck and hauling him bodily off Kuroko. But in the middle of that thought, Kuroko finally cracks a tiny half smile and shoots Kise a sidelong glance that's both exasperated and fond. “Will you _please_ stop being sarcastic?”

Kise lets go slowly, sliding his hands down Kuroko's shoulders and arms like a cat marking his territory before regarding his former teammate through half-lidded eyes. “Not being half as sarcastic as you think I am.”

“Mm-hm,” Kuroko replies, like this is an old patter between them. The way Kise's lips twist into something like a smile, if smiles could be heart-shattering, makes Taiga think that there's some sort of code going on—a call and response gone slightly off key. It's painful to watch in its awkward fumbling towards some sort of equilibrium. Taiga finds himself breaking in just to make it stop.

“So do you come out here to meet all your opponents, or are we just special?” Taiga asks lightly. Kise shifts slightly to look at him through the pretty fall of his golden hair. There's a whole lot of possessive dislike in hiss narrowed eyes. Taiga sneaks a glance at Kuroko, who's watching the pair of them with shadowed eyes and a carefully neutral face. Okay. Apparently this is going to be a _thing_. A weird, _Days-Of-Our-Lives_ thing.

“You know, I really don't care about all the 'Generation of Miracles' stuff,” Kise says with exaggerated casualness and finger quotes, “but I can't just let you go around saying you're going to beat us.”

Taiga blinks and wonders if all the players from Teikou have some sort of very specific hearing disorder. He flicks a glance at his coach, who rolls her eyes expressively. He shrugs slightly. “Sure, sure.”

Kise blinks at him, like whatever he was expecting was not what actually came out of Taiga's mouth. “Because I'm going to win this game.”

Out of the corners of his eyes Taiga sees his senpai getting restless—fidgeting with the type of irritation that could easily turn nasty given the right provocation. Not a mental place he really wants his team to be in when they're off home turf and right before a game. Kise gives him a small smirk, like he knows exactly what type of head games he's playing. The shady bastard.

Before Taiga can think of a way to defuse the situation without punching Kise in his smug mouth, a short, dark-haired boy comes flying out of the Kaijou gym and delivers a impressive front kick straight to Kise's ass. Taiga pivots to let Kise go stumbling past him and eyes the newcomer with interest. At his elbow, Coach Aida makes an appreciative sound. He takes a moment to pray to Coyote—or anyone else listening—that she doesn't start taking her cues from this boy.

“ _You're_ going to win this match? Without the rest of your team?” demands the boy while glowering ferociously at Kise, who cowers away from his rage. “Who do you think you are? Don't answer that. Go warm up, idiot!”

Aida makes more appreciative noises as Kise lopes off, slightly wilted under the baleful glare the boy turns his way, and Taiga really, really hopes she doesn't incorporate corporal punishment into her tactics for dealing with wayward basketball players. The boy plants his hands on his hips and eyes the Seirin team with only slightly less irritation. “You guys the Seirin team? I'm Kasamatsu, the captain for Kaijou. I'd apologize for my player's smart mouth, but that would mean admitting that I pay any attention to the drivel that falls out of it.”

Hyuuga covers his mouth with one fist and coughs slightly, but Taiga can see the grin threatening to split his senpai's face. He glances down at his coach and finds her studying Kasamatsu with an expression that suggests that she would dearly like to yank his shirt off. Taiga takes a moment to be impressed at way those seemingly off-hand comments manages to put the Seirin team at ease without any loss of face for the Kaijou team. Even Kuroko looks faintly impressed.

“Didn't have too much trouble finding the gym, did you?” Kasamatsu asks as he leads them in, and then continues on the same breath. “The campus is ridiculous, and I wouldn't have sent Kise to collect you except he said he knew you guys and promised to be good.” Kasamatsu pulls a face like he should have known how much stock to put in Kise's promises of good behavior, but before he can continue something catches his attention. “Ah, here's our coach. I'll let him explain.”

The Kaijou captain slides back into the huddle of his team as middle-aged man with a decided paunch, messy hair, and a permanent five o'clock shadow marches up to them. “Seirin? Where's your terror of a coach? Ah, there you are, Aida.”

Taiga expects Aida to be irritated, but she just gives the man a broad, if slightly terrifying smile. That gets her a distrustful look and then a huffing sigh that makes his bangs flutter. “I hope you don't mind too much, but we just set up the half court. There's not enough for the new guys to learn from this match to stop practice for it.”

The sheer arrogance of the statement and the way the rest of the Kaijou players manage to look down their noses at his team make even Taiga's hackles go up. He feels a slight weight on his wrist and glances down to find that Aida has snagged the cuff of his jacket with two fingers, a silent reminder to rein it in. Hyuuga steps up behind their coach and crosses his arms over his chest while he glowers back down the line of Kaijou players.

Taking his cue from his captain, Taiga slides into line behind Aida and contrives to look as intimidating as he can manage. Given that's he's closing in on 6'4'' and weighs over two hundred pounds, he's pretty sure he can handle intimidating. Taiga's not even surprised when Kuroko floats up to stand beside him. If as part of their wall of support for their coach or to try to hold them back if things go sideways, Taiga's not real sure. 

The Kaijou coach gives them a distinctly unimpressed look before turning back to Aida, whose smile has gone a touch feral around the edges. “Look, your players are still going up against our first string, all right?” He says to their coach. There's a slight note of appeasement in the comment--and a whole lot of defensiveness. Aida merely makes a non-committal humming noise. “I'll give you a couple of minutes to get them warmed up, okay?”

Taiga shoots his coach a sidelong look as the man trundles away from them with his shoulders hunched up around his ears and wonders briefly how she's managed to make a middle-aged man slink away from her like a chagrined bulldog. Aida makes a disgusted face, like she's just bitten into the bitter plum in the middle of a rice ball. 

“It would be nice, Kagami-kun,” she says without taking her eyes off the back of the Kaijou coach, “if you could give them a _proper_ greeting. Once you get on the court, naturally.”

Taiga rubs at his mouth to keep his grin from spreading. “Ma'am, yes ma'am.”

Aida sighs and pats his arm again. “Go collect your partner. I should make a rule about fraternizing with the enemy, but those Teikou players,” she says mostly to herself, Taiga thinks, shakes her head and walks back to where Hyuuga stands expectantly.

Taiga resists the urge to grab the back of Kuroko's jersey when he finds him deep in conversation with his former teammate. There's something between the two of them that draws them together like oppositely charged magnets. It's both charming and alarming to watch.

“--and then he'll have to let me play,” Taiga overhears the blond say as he marches up to the pair of them. Kuroko gives him quick look that manages to convey a deep desire to roll his eyes. Taiga restrains the urge to sigh, but spares a glance along the Kaijou line up. Kasamatsu has his arms crossed and is glaring daggers into the back of Kise's skull. Taiga's a little impressed that Kise hasn't keeled over dead from the intensity of it. 

“Go warm up,” he says to Kise without any preamble or grand standing—neither of them has the time given the way their teams are amping themselves up. “We ain't here to fool around.”

Kise blinks at him, probably over his strange syntax, but Taiga's already hauling Kuroko back to their team. He kinda expects him to protest, probably via some sort of sneaky jijutsu, but Kuroko comes along in distracted silence. 

“Kagami-kun?” Taiga pauses half in and half out of his jacket and raises an eyebrow at Kuroko. “Do you think you could play today the way you do when you play against Sei and Rei?”

Taiga can feel his heart jump straight into his throat when the rest of the team turns interested looks at them. Basketball really wasn't the vector he had expected his two opposing worlds to collide along—last thing he wants to do right before a game is spend time explaining a pair of psychotic foxes to his team. Taiga folds his jacket carefully, mostly to give himself something else to focus on while he thinks of an answer. “What do you mean?”

Kuroko gives him a look that he can't decipher—both exasperated and sly. “You play differently with them. Sneaky and,” Kuroko makes a small, wobbling hand gesture. “I'm not sure how to explain. When you play against us, you play more … honestly?” Kuroko makes a frustrated face, which is pretty hilarious to watch because he does it with just a tiny lip curl and a nose wrinkle.

“Sei and Rei?” Aida asks innocently. 

Taiga spreads his hands in the universal sign of appeasement. “They're a pair of twins that I play with sometimes. Have since junior high. And I play sneaky with them because it's always two-on-one and they _cheat_.”

Kuroko coughs lightly in a particularly unsubtle attempt to hide his laugh while Aida gives him the most skeptical of skeptical side eyes. The rest of the team seems caught between confusion and irritation at the apparent derailment of normal pre-game amp-up time. “I have not noticed Sei or Rei cheating.”

Taiga scowls at Kuroko harder. “Because they are _sneaky_ cheaters who are sneaky when they cheat.”

“I see,” Kuroko replies, but the corner of his mouth turns upward ever so slightly in a gesture that could be a sneer or a smile, depending.

“Streetball,” Aida says, effectively disrupting what's probably going to be an argument that Taiga's destined to lose. Taiga eyes her with mild apprehension. But his coach seems content to contemplate the distance somewhere off Taiga's left shoulder. Her gaze snaps back to Kuroko with alarming intensity. “And he plays differently there?”

Kuroko blinks slightly and inhales slowly before answering, as if giving himself time to think. “He's more thoughtful,” he says finally.

“That's because they're sneaky. Just because I can't catch them cheating doesn't mean that they aren't,” Taiga says defensively, his shoulders hitching up around his ears. Of course, Sei and Rei didn't cheat in any way a normal human would notice, but that didn't mean that the pair of them didn't do it. “No one on our team cheats so I don't have to worry about it.”

Aida pats his arm gently, a faint smile hovering around the edges of her expression. “I think it might be wise to not give that benefit of a doubt to our opponents, yes?”

Taiga opens his mouth to argue, because why the fuck would a nationally ranked team cheat, when the golden glow of that damned kitsune catches his eye. He snaps his mouth closed so hard his teeth click. “Yeah,” he replies, glaring at the smug fox, who merely yawns—nicely showing him all of her teeth. “That might be a good idea.”

“A thoughtful Kagami,” Hyuuga mutters as he adjusts the laces of his sneakers. “This is gonna be something.”

Taiga kinda wants to protest, but figures that it would both waste time and irritate the second years, so he lets it go in favor focusing on the court and the game. He ignores the normal posturing that goes on during the initial line up. Not a lot there that they haven't already seen. Kasamatsu sets the tone for his team (excepting, apparently, Kise) and that tone, Taiga decides as he watched opposing team greet them, is confident, determined and just a little bit proud. He can do something with that pride. They aren't gonna come out of the gates playing full on with pride like that. Not for a bunch of upstarts in a two-year old club.

He feels more than hears Kuroko sigh and shoots him a slide-long glance. Kuroko quirks a smile back up at him. “Yes, this will be something.”

Normally he'd raz Kuroko a bit for that one, but the game is on and Kasamatsu already has the ball. So he just rolls his eyes at his partner as he goes after his mark. Which is a challenge itself because Kasamatsu is no slouch. It peeves Taiga just a little bit that he can tell that Kasamatsu is holding back, not really playing full out yet. There's a softness to his movements, a slight pause when he goes for a feint, that suggests that the third-year is waiting for something.

Taiga jostles him a little bit when he steals the ball, not enough to eat a foul, but enough to tell Kasamatsu that he knows what's up and ain't gonna stand for that shit. Kasamatsu gives him a grin with just enough condescension to make Taiga's blood go into a low-grade boil. He snorts when Kasamatsu goes for a backhand steal—shifting his weight to his heels so Kasamatsu smacks into him and takes a blocking foul for it. Short prick has the audacity to laugh softly about it.

Rather than playing the little game of hide-the-ball that he had been planning—generally a fun way of making a half court into a problem for anyone without the bulk to screen the ball with their own bodies—Taiga takes three running steps into a leap that lets him slam a dunk into net. Let that tiny terror of captain laugh _that_ off.

It takes a moment for the smug to wear off—he knows that nearly no one on the high school circuit can pull off that stunt—to realize that everyone is staring at him with their mouths hanging open. Taiga sticks his hands on hips, a scowl starting to drag his eyebrows down until he feels like he can almost see them, and opens his mouth to yell at all of them when an odd weight in his right hand finally catches his attention. 

He's got the hoop in his right hand. What. The. Fuck.

Taiga turns to Kuroko, who has his hands over his face while his shoulders shake slightly. Giving up his partner as a useless lost cause, he turns to his coach to find her desperately trying not to cackle in the face of the Kaijou coach while he fumes at her. And though he's happy that she's not pissed with him, that does leave him stuck with the hoop—it even had a bit of the backboard stuck to it, rusted nails and all. Here he'd thought Kaijou was an expensive school. 

While he's standing there standing staring at the hoop, completely baffled as to what to do with it, Kuroko manages to get himself back together long enough to comment. “That is indeed one way of giving them a proper greeting.”

“Don't even start, menace,” Taiga snipes back, waving the basketball hoop at him. “Just don't.”

Kasamatsu coughs slightly to catch his attention. “Give me the hoop. Maintenance will want to look at it.”

Taiga hands it over, trying not to just wave it in Kasamatsu's face. “I didn't intend to, uh...”

Kasamatsu arches one dark eyebrow while his lips twitch slightly—whether it's an aborted smile or scowl, Taiga can't tell—and then sighs. “Yeah, yeah, I don't think anyone could possibly plan to do that, but you've made your coach super happy. Give us, like, fifteen, and we'll set up the full court.” Kasamatsu's gaze flicks over Taiga's shoulder and he resists the urge hunch his shoulders in response. When the other boy's brows furrow into withering disdain the urge intensifies. “Your coach isn't the only one who is happy about this either.” Kasamatsu scrubs his hands over his face and then waves one hand in the universal sign of dismissal. “Go back to your team while I deal with my idiots.”

Taiga glances over his shoulder to see where Kise is nearly bouncing in glee. When the blond catches him watching Kise promptly presents him with double thumbs up. Taiga looks back at Kasamatsu, who has gone roughly the same shade as an heirloom tomato. “Good luck with that?”

That earns him a look that is two parts rue and one part don't-be-cute before Kasamatsu stomps back to his team, ruined hoop in one hand and yelling. Taiga chews on his top lip to keep from laughing. Last thing he wanted was Kaijou's firecracker of a captain turning around and deciding that yelling at him is also a necessary thing. He obediently trots back to his team where his own captain gives him a long look before pressing two fingers to the bridge of his nose and heaving a sigh. Taiga opens his mouth to defend himself, finds no useful defenses, and then just shrugs. 

Aida catches his arm and practically wraps herself around it. “You are my favorite,” she coos, which—Taiga isn't gonna lie—makes a chill run down his spine. “You are absolutely my favorite.”

“Let go of him,” Hyuuga says, physically untangling her from Taiga, but not before giving Taiga a very nasty glare. Which, well, that was interesting. And definitely a thing to be careful about in the future. 

Aida lets Hyuuga pull her away, apparently completely oblivious to the way he man-handles her. She favours Taiga with an enormous smile. “I so love players who obey orders.”

Taiga notes the way Hyuuga's hand stays on her elbow and the way his eye twitches slightly. “Um, I'm glad you're glad?”

Aida sort of coos at him again, which honestly is just damned alarming, so Taiga switches his attention to his slightly fuming captain. Hyuuga pushes his glasses up with his free hand and sighs again. Taiga's fascinated by the way his eyebrows beetle together and then finally smooth themselves out as he exhales. “Well, you've gone gotten them good and riled up. I don't think they'll be underestimating us now.”

The way Hyuuga's mouth pulls to the side and his mildly irritated tone makes little bells go off in Taiga's head. “You were planning on them underestimating us?”

Hyuuga gives him a long and infinitely bland look over the tops of his glasses before heaving a sigh that seems to originate somewhere in the center of the Earth's molten core. Hyuuga doesn't even bother to respond to him but turns to Kuroko and waves one hand to encompass the entirety of Taiga's being. “You call this thoughtful?”

His partner, damn the little shit, just looks up at Taiga from the sides of his eyes with a faint smile. “Now, yes, I think so.”

Before Taiga can shake Kuroko into explaining what the fuck that's supposed to mean, Aida manages to shake herself out of whatever reverie of schadenfreude she's gone into. She claps her hands together in a way that makes all the second years take a neat step backward from her while giving her distinctly concerned faces. “As exciting and fun as that was, we now need to be prepared for them to take us far more seriously than they were before.” She sighs slightly. “I wasn't expecting them to get this serious until the second quarter, but oh well.”

Hyuuga coughs something into his fist that sounds suspiciously like 'you asked for it.' Aida gives him a glinty-eyed look before continuing as if she's heard nothing but wind through the trees. “That means we'll have to use some of the strategies that we had thought we could save until the Winter Cup preliminaries at least.”

Hyuuga coughs again, but this time it's a faintly disagreeing sound. Aida cocks her head at him with one eyebrow arched. “I think right now they're going to take Kagami seriously, but I don't think that extends to the rest of us.”

Taiga and the rest of the team stay silent as their coach considers the Kaijou team with a faint furrow of her brows. They all back up when she makes small 'pah' noise and nods. “No, you're probably right. They're thinking that Kagami-kun is a new unknown that's making us cocky, but they won't be looking at the second years at all. That'll give us some room to work with.”

“They will be putting Kise on the court now,” Kuroko says softly. Aida and Hyuuga sigh in such perfect harmony that Taiga can't help but be fascinated by it. “He will take everything quite seriously, despite how he looks.”

“Not an idiot then?” Aida asks while drumming her fingers against her lips.

“No, but he is good at making others think so—to their detriment,” Kuroko responds with a quick downward flick of his eyes while the corner of his mouth ticks upward. It happens so fast that Taiga almost misses it. He suddenly wishes that he could see Kise and whether he was talking about his former teammate with similar wry affection. The pair of them are, Taiga decides, a goddamned mess. 

Aida cocks her head to the side as she considers Kuroko. “Mark him. You know him best and any shenanigans he might pull.”

Kuroko opens his mouth to argue—they don't have him mark someone specific but use him a free-floating fifth to pick up slack—but Aida shakes her head with a gentle smile while Hyuuga glowers alarmingly. “No, don't complain about it.”

Taiga is a little surprised when Kuroko subsides, all though he continues to frown in a way Taiga's sure is gonna put permanent worry lines on him. He shifts slightly, drawing attention off Kuroko and back onto himself. “You want me to keep marking their captain?” He asks as politely as he knows how.

Aida huffs a laugh at him. “What's with the polite language now?” She waves off his explanation before a syllable can even fall from his lips, “yeah, yeah mark 'em because he's going to be trouble. But!” She drives a hard finger into his solar plexus, making him wince. “If you catch a foul off him because he makes you all hot and bothered again I will hang your skin from the ceiling. Clear?”

He notes with a certain degree of trepidation that the entirety of the team has hunched up defensively this pronouncement. Aida beams a pretty smile at him, which does not alleviate any of his fears. “Crystal,” he says while rubbing his chest. Somewhere in that girl's genetic line was some kinda fury. He's sure of it.

And with that they seemed to be done with the drama section of the strategy meeting. The game plan Aida lays out is both simple and devious. Taiga's not so sure that Kasamatsu will fall for the “oh no, our entire strategy revolves around two rookie players,” but weirder things have happened, he supposes. When he says as much Aida lets out a rueful little laugh.

“Well, it's not that much of a ruse, really,” she replies quietly as the rest of the team warms up while Kaijou runs around trying to get the full court set up. “I'm not sure we could beat them without you and Kuroko. They're a really strong team and we're dow--” Aida shakes her head. “We're still figuring something out.”

Taiga really wants to push her to spit out whatever it was she was gonna say, but she's got her arms wrapped around her stomach like she's just taken a blow and it makes him think that maybe prying right before a game is't a good plan. Instead he rolls his shoulders to loosen back up. “Well, I'll try not to disappoint.”

“Please do,” she replies. “I really hate losing.”

That makes him laugh a little. “Don't we all?” he asks over his shoulder as he trots out to the line up. He's still snickering to himself over her annoyed face as he settles himself in front of Kise, who gives him such a look of deep dislike that Taiga wonders if maybe he accidentally insulted his mother or something. Dude had problems. 

It surprises Taiga a little bit that neither Kise nor his little kitsune rider has anything snippy to say to him while they're all lined up, but apparently Kise's finally decided to shut up and focus. Kise has also clearly been told to mark him, as Taiga can't shake the asshole to get to his own mark. Kuroko catches his eye as they jockey for position and then slides to mark Kasamatsu, who gives Kuroko an undecipherable look. Kise has obviously been talking up his former teammate, but it looks like his new teammates aren't quite buying it. 

Kise jostles him a little, just a shoulder against his forearm as he goes to shoot, but it's enough to make him turn what would've been a nice lay-up into a pass to Mitobe. Taiga can't help the way his mouth pulls to one side, or stop the little tongue click of annoyance. Kise gives him one of those feline—or, Taiga supposes, vulpine—smiles. “Didn't I say? I'm not going to just hand you this game,” he remarks with a light tone belayed by the sharp, nearly angry look in his eyes.

Taiga just cocks his head, something that makes Kise's eyes narrow into golden slits, and smiles. “So you did.”

Then he pulls one Rei's favorite tricks out his hat. Shifting slightly to the left he uses the mass of his own body to hide the ball while pointing his feet at Mitobe. Then he drops backward and neatly steps around Kise to go for the basket himself, hopping up into a neat little hook shot while Kise's trying to get his balance back. Kise gives him a small smile, like he's done something cute.

When Kise catches up to him, about two steps into the free throw line, he pulls the same damned trick as if he'd been doing it all his life. Taiga can't manage to get his eyebrows back into an even line when he meets Kise at center court. Kise smirks at him a little. “Anything you throw at me, I'll return to you twice as hard,” he comments.

“That so?” Taiga replies, trying for nonchalant and just knowing he's coming off as petulant and annoyed. Because, dude, kinda rude to just straight up copy a guy's moves seconds after he does a trick. Just rude. 

He goes for a hard drive down center court, shaking off Kasamatsu and Kaijou's brick shithouse of a center, to slam a dunk into Kaijou's basket. Kise steals the ball off Koganei, side-steps Mitobe and does the same same thing. 

Taiga does a bait'n'dodge feint and runs down the outside to sink a floater shot into the net, nicely avoiding Kaijou's power forward, who shouts in irritation. And Kise, who Taiga is starting to seriously dislike, does the same thing to poor Izuki. (Who then makes a series of confusing puns about copies. Like, what?) When they meet up at center court Taiga knows he's about two breaths from growling and Kise is grinning like he's just gotten into the hen house. Fortunately, Aida calls for time before Taiga can do something really stupid. Like pop Kise one in his perfect goddamned teeth. 

Aida's got her arms crossed over her chest and is tapping one foot in murderous rhythm. “I thought I told you to be thoughtful?” she gripes at him as he comes trotting up to her. “Are you just going to hand that blond idiot your entire repertoire?”

“Not my fault the dude is rude as shit,” Taiga snipes back before he can think better of it. 

“Rude?” echoes Kuroko as if Taiga has just said the sky is purple or that sparrows swim. 

“Yeah, dude, rude!” Taiga tries really hard not to wave his hands around. There might be a little hand waving. “Like, okay, whatever, people steal people's moves all the damned time. Half the shit I was doing out there came from freaking Rei anyway, but you don't just go and straight up copy their asses a half second later. It's rude!”

Kuroko gives him a long, baffled look and just blinks. 

Aida presses two fingers to the bridge of her nose like she's got a monster headache. “We are nearly ten points down and you're pissed because you think _Kise is being rude?!_ ” 

Taiga feels himself just sort of …. deflate when she puts it that way. “Yeah. Kinda,” he mutters while staring at his hands. He doesn't even complain when he gets matching smacks up the backside of his head.

“I told you Kagami-kun and thoughtful were two things that don't go together,” Hyuuga comments to Aida while rubbing his left hand slightly. Taiga frowns. His head isn't that hard. 

Their coach doesn't respond, merely studies Taiga with a perfectly flat mouth. “Are you done being stupid? Would you like to play seriously now?”

“I have been playing seriously,” he retorts, internally wincing at the way his voice climbs in pitch towards the end of that sentence. By god he wasn't gonna whine, but … “little sonuvabitch is a pushy rude bastard.”

“Kagami-kun,” Kuroko comments quietly as the upperclassmen collectively inhale to yell at him. “You are behaving exactly as Kise-kun wants you to.”

Taiga snaps his head to stare at Kuroko so fast his neck muscles protest. Because oh _hell_ no. Kuroko smiles softly at him and doesn't say 'so are you going to play his game, or your own?' because that would be overkill and Kuroko likes to think of himself as being a subtle person. Taiga takes a deep breath and rakes his hands through his hair, pulling at it a bit to get himself back together, because this shit is just embarrassing.

Aida watches him with amusement she doesn't even bother to hide. “Would you like to me to slap you to get your head back into the game?”

Taiga looks at her for a second. She's not wearing that little smile she normally does when making slightly sarcastic comments, which means Aida Riko—demon of a girl—is completely serious. He runs his tongue over his teeth briefly. “Uh, no. I'd like to keep all my teeth in my head, if it's all the same to you.”

That startles a laugh out of her—a high, clear sound—and she shakes her head at him. “If you've gotten your senses back, go back out there and stop being stupid, please.”

He gives a little salute. “Ma'am, yes ma'am.” 

Kise's waiting for him at center court—all glowing golden and smug as hell. “Your coach angry with you?” he comments lightly while looking over Aida (who glares back at him). 

Taiga gives Kise a long look, unsure of how to interpret Kise's comment and body language. “Rules or no rules, you say something rude about Coach Aida and I will beat your ass like a fucking drum,” he says—states really—to be on the safe side. 

Kise startles for a moment, nearly tripping over his own feet. Taiga takes that opportunity to make a pass to Koganei—thank you for the screen, Kise—who fumbles the shot, but Mitobe gets it in on the rebound. Kise pulls a face at him. “I wouldn't dream of being rude to your coach,” Kise says, his eyebrows pulled down low, but with a twist to his mouth that suggests he's not just confused by accusation; he's offended.

Makes Taiga think better of the guy, just a bit. “Just being clear.” Then he does Rei's bait'n'dodge into a full court press. 

Kise meets him at the net and manages to get the height to smack the ball out of Taiga's hand. Which is a little impressive, Taiga isn't gonna lie. Kise smirks at him—it's like the dude's favorite expression. “Didn't I tell you? Anything you throw at me, I'll return twice as hard.”

Taiga resists the urge to roll his eyes at Kise, because come on. Kise's watching him with a whisper of a smile playing on his mouth. It's enough to make Taiga pause before trying to feint around him again. He slips the ball to Izuki—who sighs with relief and passes it to the outside, where Hyuuga is waiting to make one his three-point shots.

Kise makes an irritated face at him. Anything that annoys him, Taiga figures, is a good thing. So he keeps that going for a little bit—using Kuroko's sneaky, shadow-passes and his own streetball tricks to act as linchpins to keep the game to the outsides where Hyuuga and Mitobe can terrorize Kaijou players with their three-point shots. Kise all but snarls at him when he drifts back and palms a pass to Izuki who nearly gets a lay-up over the Kaijou center. 

“Think I found your weakness,” Taiga comments lightly, trying to keep the smug out his voice. He reaches back to where he can feel Kuroko's presence buzzing with Fourth World energy and ruffles his hair. “This guy, and a passing game.”

Kise snorts while Kuroko bats his hand away. “Yeah, yeah, I can't copy Kuroko, but you can't win a game by just passing!”

Taiga spreads his hands and just grins. Because, uh, hello? They kinda are winning with a passing game. Kise growls at him and manages to steal the ball off Koganei, again, before Taiga can block him. Taiga hustles into his space, not enough to eat a blocking foul, but enough that Kise almost takes a possession foul trying to find away a round him. Kise still manages to get a shot up over Taiga's head—dude has some serious wingspan that he keeps hidden—but it takes him so long that it gives Taiga some ideas.

He catches Kuroko's eye as they charge down the court. Kuroko's eyebrows shoot straight to his hairline, but he gives a tiny shrug. Taiga goes for a dunk, the one that he knows Kise just loves to intercept, and chews on the inside of his lip when Kise snaps up the ball like a fish does a fat worm. 

“You can't keep using the same tricks, expecting them to work on me!” Kise crows. Taiga doesn't even bother to say anything, because Kuroko is right there behind him, delicately stealing the ball that Kise all but offers up on a silver platter.

Kise's strangled noise of offended outrage is the very best thing, Taiga decides. He'll have to find more ways of provoking it. He and Kuroko keep that up for a while, because Kise seems clinically incapable of not taking any bait that Taiga dangles in front of him. It's like no one has taught Kise the concept of decoy player. 

Kasamatsu blocks his next fishing attempt with an annoyed grimace. “Your small forward has a couple of, ah, gaps in his training,” Taiga helpfully points out.

That gets him a vicious glare and, if they hadn't been on the court, probably a kicking. Taiga's about to chortle to himself when something strange happens. Kasamatsu notices Kuroko drifting up to steal the ball from behind him. Taiga manages to intercept the pass Kasamatsu tries to shoot off to ward Kuroko, but it's clear something is up. Taiga shakes his head trying to clear it. Kuroko is still swarmed in shadow tendrils, still floating half in and half out of Fourth World like normal (the fact that Taiga is now taking that as being 'normal' makes him worry for his sanity), but for some reason the Kaijou players were slowly becoming aware of him. 

Taiga glance at the ball, which still has little tendrils of shadow clinging to it. He absentmindedly cleanses them while scanning for that damned kitsune. Doesn't take long, as Kise's decided to mark Kuroko—the clash of their respective auras sets off the court in a strange light display that makes it hard for him to focus on either one of them and gives him a nasty headache to boot. 

Kuroko glances at him from over Kise's shoulder as Taiga slides into a double mark position. Kise, for his part, barely seems to notice him, but something in Kuroko's shoulders sort of settles down. “I am not playing this game alone, Kise-kun,” Kuroko says in that quiet, definite way of his.

Taiga's not sure what's going on between the two of them now, but he knows a declaration when he hears one. He slows his heartbeat from its rapid fire pace, forcing himself to breath slow and deliberate through his nose. When Kise goes for a break—golden eyes locked on pale blue—Taiga pivots off his back foot to scoop the ball from under Kise's fingers in mid-dribble. 

It's a risky move, Taiga knows, to do a back-tip steal when a player is about to charge in the other direction. You risk fucking up your own footing. Eating a blocking foul if the other player slams into you. Any number of things can go wrong. Like, for example, Kise jerking in surprise at Taiga's sudden movement and trying to spin to face him—bringing his elbow straight down onto the side of Taiga's head as he tries to sprint in the opposite direction. 

Taiga catches Kise's aborted movement out of the corner of his eye and has time to think 'oh, _shit_ ' before things go very bright and then very dark.

There's a golden glow in the darkness that slowly chases away the shadow until it's just him and that damned kitsune sitting in the middle of a vast nothing. She looks beautiful, delicate, and perfect, kneeling back on her heels and watching him with an expression he can't quite decipher. “You are an odd onmyouji,” she comments. 

“A what now?” Taiga asks. She sighs softly, like cherry blossoms falling onto a still pond. Suddenly there is a tea service floating between them—a fussy western-style, porcelain affair when he would have thought she'd go for some sort of a complicated traditional Japanese ceremony.

The kitsune doesn't respond to him as she deftly pours them both softly steaming cups of something that smells like his mother's favorite rose tea. He gives her a very hard look. He's had spirits try to use his mother's memory to fuck with him before. It hasn't ever worked out well for them.

She just smiles and offers him a cup on its little saucer. “You have a very strong memory of this. It shapes this place—not me.”

Taiga's not sure he completely buys that, but it'd be rude to argue with her at this point. He sighs as he accepts the cup. If one thing about all of Coyote's reality warping teaching sessions has taught him, it's that there was nothing really to do but to let these things run themselves through. Fighting it generally makesthings worse. The kitsune smiles like a gracious host as he takes the cup and lifts her own to her lips. Her sound of startled pleasure makes him think that she really isn't shaping their little oasis in the darkness. 

“I'm sorry, but what is an onmyouji?” he asks again, politer this time because sometimes manners will get you what force will not. 

The kitsune rests the cup in its little saucer on her knees and regards him with a surprisingly gentle expression, given all the antagonism before. “Very odd. You don't even know what you are?”

Taiga holds up a hand and thinks of the Nevada deserts, so dry it feels like you'll never know water again but so full of light and beauty that you won't even miss it. That chases the shadows back even farther, revealing an expanse of rock and sand and the illusion of sun reflecting off both. He smiles at her surprised inhale. “I think I just don't know the word,” he tells her. “I've been called a shaman. My mother,” he swallows around the lump in his throat and the pain in his heart, “my mother was a healer in the traditional way.”

This makes the kitsune cock her head to the side, her long hair spilling down one shoulder. He's suddenly aware that she is very beautiful in that classical Japanese sense—all dark hair and steel hidden in silk. She smiles at him like she knows that thought and then settles back, suddenly very formal. Setting the teacup to one side, she does a precise bow of introduction. “Forgive my earlier rudeness, I should have introduced myself. My name is Sayoko. I am a myoubu and I have been a guardian of Sasuke Inari Shrine for the past 700 years. Though lately I have been a little more … focused in my guarding.”

Taiga thinks for a second of copying her move, but knows he'd just fuck it up. But then he thinks, fuck that. This is his illusion of his desert and he'll greet her according to his traditions. He settles himself into a comfortable cross-legged position and then raises right hand to her palm out to show he has no weapons, and keeps his left hand on his knee to show he knows no fear. “I am Taiga Kagami, shaman-in-training under Áłtsé Hashké. My mother was Ada Ramâh, a healer of Navajo Nation.”

There is an echo of thunder across the desert at Coyote's name and Taiga has to bite his lip at Coyote's taste for melodrama. Sayoko, for her part, shifts slightly as if hearing someone call her name from a great distance. Then she shakes herself all over, as if shedding water. “I have a request, Kagami-sama, son of Ada Ramâh, if I might be so bold?”

Taiga blinks at the sudden formality and the upgrade in status. He racks his brain for the proper polite language because, ugh, polite language. “It is fortunate, Sayoko-san, that you have a request because I have one in return.”

Sayoko lifts the teacup and smiles over its rim. “Then perhaps we can help one another. What is your request?”

Oh no, he knows how this game is played. “I believe you first indicated that you had a request?”

Sayoko doesn't even blink, just inclines her head slightly. “Indeed, thank you for hearing this unworthy one out. There has come into my territory a creature of shadow that I do not understand and cannot chase out. I would like to request your help in exorcising it.”

Taiga blinks for a second and then can almost feel the light bulb go off over his head. Kuroko and that damned shadowman, duh. Sayoko favors him with a slight smile that he can't quite read. He can sense the trap, but feels like he's trying to find its edges under three inches of sand. “I believe I have some knowledge of what it is that you speak. I have taken some steps to contain the … entity.”

That gets him a long look under her eyelashes. “Ah, I thought I felt a slight damping of my abilities. Is that your doing?”

Honestly, he hadn't been sure that the medicine pouches would passively work against a kitsune of her level. He knew that they would work to block anything that she actively throws at them, but as generalized dampening field … huh. Taiga takes a slow sip of his own tea before responding. “I took precautions before coming here in case things were not, ah, amicable. A type of ward, if you will.”

Sayoko blinks twice quickly, but chooses to take a sip of her own tea rather than respond immediately. Taiga gets the feeling that maybe she let slip something that she now know realizes she didn't need to. “You have not activated this ward?”

He smiles slightly. “It would only activate if something was attempted against one of the players.” The kitsune blinks again, her eyes flickering down to her teacup. Taiga works very hard to keep his face under control for all he really, really wants to cackle. Because, gotcha, bitch! He doesn't, however, rub it in her face, because he'd really like to wake up from this dream state sometime this century and he's pretty sure she could make that difficult for him. “Of course, if you attempted something against this shadow-being and it happened to be attached to one the players, well, I am not so sophisticated in my warding.”

“Of course,” Sayoko echoes softly. She then looks him straight in the eyes and he's stunned for a moment by her sheer physical beauty. “I would like to hear your request?”

“Let go of Kise,” Taiga blurts out before he thinks about it. Which, god _dammit_. Sneaky, pretty foxes and their cheating. 

That startles a laugh out of the kitsune. “Let _go_ of him?”

Taiga waves his hand as if to wipe his previous words out of the air. “Forgive my poor phrasing. I would respectfully request that you, um, release your attachment to Kise Ryouta.”

He reviews that phrase in his head and he's pretty sure its sufficient to get the damned fox to stop riding Kise so he can go back to being a normal boy—albeit one with scary good basketball skills and way too much ego. Sayoko opens her mouth and then shuts it with a click. Rather than reply she picks up her teacup and swirls the remainder of her tea around before taking a sip. He's not sure if he's offended her or if she's just stalling for other reasons.

Sayoko lets the silence stretch to awkward lengths between them until Taiga's expending some serious willpower to keep from fidgeting. “If I agree to release Kise Ryouta then will you help me to exorcise the shadow-being that has entered my territory and threatens my shrine?”

Now it's Taiga's turn to sip his tea to hide his desperately racing thoughts. The deal looks okay. He wants to get that damned shadowman off Kuroko anyway, so the deal looks like a win-win. But he knows things can't be that simple—not with a kitsune of her age and power sitting across from him smiling so sweetly. Conditions, he decides, he needs some conditions—fail-safe clauses in case things go sideways. “I have a few requirements.”

Sayoko smiles with just the barest corners of her lips and regards him from under her lashes. It's a charming look, but he refuses to let himself be beguiled again. “Of course,” she murmurs and spreads her hands over her knees. “You have but to speak them.”

“Nothing that will place Kuroko Tetsuya in danger or harm—physical or psychological harm,” he says holding up one finger. “Nothing that threatens the physical or mental well-being of my team.” Taiga thinks for a moment and then sighs. “Nothing that threatens the physical or mental well-being of the Kaijou team.”

Sayoko rocks back on her heels with one hand over her mouth as she contemplates him. “No provisions to protect yourself, little onmyouji? You are either very sure of yourself or very foolish.”

It takes all his willpower not to grimace, because he should have thought about that. He's not sure how to approach that particular problem: bluster at her—which she will probably see through—or try to re-negotiate—which will make him look weak. He feels both very young and very vulnerable. A sudden wind scatters sand across them, making Sayoko shriek and move to protect her complicated hair-do. Massive paws appear beside him and he can feel Coyote manifest around him. Taiga closes his eyes and takes a long breath in through the nose and out through his mouth. “Ànaaì, I was not expect you to join us.”

He half expects Coyote to laugh or make some sort of funny comment, but the elder god does neither. “Atsilì, you know I am never far from you.”

Taiga reaches out to pat one enormous paw, immeasurably relieved to find it solid beneath his fingers. “Thank you, ánaaì.”

Sayoko regards the pair of them with eyes gone huge—her disbelief written across her face as if stamped there. To her credit she gets herself back together quickly, folding her hands over her knees so just the tips of her fingers touch the desert sand as she bows low. “Noble lord, I am honored to make your acquaintance. May I have the pleasure of your name?”

Coyote laughs his nightmare laugh, but it's lower than the high, yipping shriek Taiga has grown up with, a low sound that scrapes along the back of his mind and makes him shudder. “You were given my name and did not pay attention? For shame, little fox.” 

Sayoko shoots Taiga a horrified look from where she remains bowed over her knees. “A thousand apologies, noble lord.”

“Coyote,” Taiga says in his most soothing tone, rubbing a hand along one paw. “Sayoko has been polite—treating me as an equal even though I am so young.”

Coyote rubs the edge of his jaw along Taiga's shoulders, nearly bowling him over. “You are very young,” Coyote murmurs. Then he sits back on his haunches and Taiga has to crane his neck to see the elder god's yellow-red eyes in depths of the great void. “And you are my favorite, so like your mother. Should harm behall you, I will be inconsolable for as long as it takes all the storytellers in all the tribes to agree upon the story of how I made the first obsidian-eyed man.”

Taiga generally tunes out Coyote's melodrama, but something in the way the elder god phrases it rings bells in the back of his mind. He must have made some sort of sound because Coyote leans down and nudges him a bit with his muzzle. “Atsilì? Something bothers you.”

“Ah, no. Just thinking of something,” Taiga responds absently. “I'll smudge later to talk to you about it. I've just had a thought. Something you might be able to help with.”

Coyote's tail wraps around him—both impossibly soft and suffocating. It takes Taiga a long moment while he struggles to get free of the fur to realize that the low rumbling of thunder is in fact Coyote's chuckle. “Uh, did I do something funny?”

He finds himself confronted with one yellow-red eye cocked to peer down at him, the rest of Coyote's features blurring into the darkness. “You have asked for my help! Without being pressed! It is a momentous day.” 

Taiga scrunches his eyes closed for a moment, because god _dammit_. One of these days he's going to learn to think first and then talk. “Well,” he says slowly. “I think I may have found something of yours.”

“Something of mine? On that tiny little rock in the middle of the sea?” Coyote asks while Sayoko delicately sputters in muted indignation. “I wait with trembling anticipation to hear it!”

“I'll smudge you,” Taiga promises, trying very hard not to think of how enormously weird his life is. Just going to use an ancient ritual to call up an elder god (the ritual shouldn't even _work_ that way!) to chat about how maybe one of his creations is running around Japan causing problems. No big deal. Taiga wishes for a moment that he could beat his head against the sand. It might be an improvement.

“See that you do,” Coyote says, and then leans his muzzle until it is scant inches from Sayoko's face. “And if, little fox, my apprentice is unable to summon me, I will find you and I will eat you.” 

With that last little promise, Coyote vanishes as if he had never been. Sayoko and Taiga sit staring at one another for a long moment. Taiga kinda hopes she's trying just as hard as he is to get some semblance of control back together. He hates it when Coyote decides to go all monster god, but it's not like there's much he can do about it. Ask politely for the ancient trickster god to please play nicely with the other spirits? He snorts at the idea and his own ridiculousness. 

“So,” Taiga says, trying to clear the air a little. “You've just met my teacher. I'd apologize for his bad mood but that just … him, really.”

Sayoko just looks at him with faintly stunned expression and blinks.

He sighs. “I'll try to do something about the shadowman; however, if it does have something to do with Coyote, I make few promises as to my success. I would still like to request that you release Kise.”

At the sound of Kise's name, Sayoko starts slightly. She places two fingers against her lips and looks away from him, looking blankly out into the endless darkness instead. “Ah, Ryouta,” she sighs and then cocks her head. “I can promise to not ride him as my mortal vessel.”

Taiga blinks and rocks back a little. He hadn't expected her to simply give Kise up so easily. Coyote must have rattled her far more than he thought. “You have my gratitude and, uh.” He isn't really sure how to ask 'could you please let me go from this nowhere space so I can go kick your favorite mortal's ass at basketball' in a polite fashion, so he kinda just blinks at her. “Um.”

Sayoko tilts her head at him and smiles that tiny smile of hers. “I think that perhaps it is time for you to return to your team, Kagami-sama. They are most concerned.”

Taiga opens his mouth to respond, but finds all his breath sucked out his mouth as if some great hand is pushing down on his chest. Sayoko's features blur into an indistinguishable mess of shade and color while the darkness of the void slowly grows to an overwhelming brightness. He shut his eyes against the visual confusion and tries to rub at them only to find that his arms aren't responding quite right. It's as if he's moving while under water or wearing heavy weights. He flails for a second, trying not to panic.

Something catches his hand, holding it still, and then the light and sound come back on as if someone flipped a switch. He startles when Aida lifts the damp cloth off his eyes to glare down at him. “You can't even be unconscious quietly!”

“I was unconscious?” he asks, because that's kinda alarming. “How long?”

“Only for a few moments, but you were very disoriented,” Kuroko responds while Aida chews on her bottom lip. “We thought it best if you laid down for a bit.”

“We should have you examined. If you have a concussion or something else...” Aida says as he sits up. Her hands hover around his shoulders for a moment before falling back onto her lap. “I don't think you should sit up.”

“I feel fine, actually,” he comments more to himself than to anyone else. He touches the side of his head. “I don't even have a headache.”

Aida and Kuroko exchange a look and then look at him with identical worried expressions. It's then that he notices the beat and squeak of shoes on the court. He arches an eyebrow at the pair of them. “I get knocked unconscious and that doesn't stop the game?”

Aida has the grace to look chagrined while Kuroko just looks amused. He gives one of his tiny one-shouldered shrugs. “We thought you would be fine? You have a very hard head.”

“So how is Kise's elbow?” Taiga snipes back. 

“Unfortunately, no worse for wear,” Aida sighs. Behind her Taiga can see the Kaijou team dominating Seirin on the court. Even from his perspective from behind the bench he can tell they were keep Seirin second-years pinned into the center of the court, effectively neutralizing Hyuuga's threepoint shots and putting pressure on Mitobe and Tsuchida. 

Taiga cracks his neck from side to side. “I can play.”

“As hard as your head may be, Kagami-kun,” Kuroko says, a certain sharpness creeping into his tone, “even you should take care not to overextend after taking a blow like that.”

“I can play,” he repeats, ignoring Kuroko and locking eyes with his coach. Aida chews on her lower lip, and then on the nail of one thumb. Taiga gently pulls her hand away from her mouth and makes her look at him. “I'm fine. Promise. You know it'll rattle the hell out of Kaijou to have me back out on the court.” 

She stares at where he has her hand trapped between his and then sighs. “Fine. But I'm sending Kuroko out with you.” She glances at Kuroko who looks startled. “You said your misdirection stops working if you are on the court too long. Do you think your absence has been long enough for that to wear off now?”

Kuroko blinks at her and Taiga files that information away to poke at later, because that's damned interesting. “I am uncertain. Perhaps?” Kuroko responds—clearly torn between wanting to go back out onto the court and wanting to hustle Taiga to the nearest emergency room.

Aida pulls her hand from Taiga's grip, but does so gently. “Alright. I'll sub the two of you back in. But if you look like you are in pain, or trouble, or--”

“You'll pull me out,” Taiga finishes for her as he stands up. Cracking his arms up and over his head he grins at her. “Don't worry. I feel like I just took a nice little nap.”

Aida glowers at him for a moment and then shakes her head as she goes to call the substitution.

Kuroko's still watching him with a faint line between his eyes. When Aida gets the substitution called, Kuroko sighs hard enough to set his bangs fluttering. Taiga's not real sure what he's done to earn that level of worry, but is sort of charmed despite himself. He offers his fist to Kuroko. “We got this.”

Kuroko gives him a long look before tapping Taiga's fist with his own. “This is such an unwise plan.”

Kise watches as they lope back onto the court with an expression Taiga can't read and then shakes his head slightly. Kuroko promptly peels off to mark his former teammate. Unfinished business, Taiga assumes, and arches an eyebrow at his captain, who jerks his chin at Kasamatsu. 

Kasamatsu doesn't even look surprised to see him on the court again. “Your tiny partner made a scene when you took that hit,” he comments as Taiga moves to mark him. “It upset my small forward.”

“Your small forward gets upset by bad hair days,” Taiga says as he steals the ball. “I think he'll get over it.”

Kasamatsu huffs a laugh as he chases after Taiga, neatly blocking any ability for Taiga to move into a lane-up, which would have been his preference. He passes to Hyuuga, waiting on the outside, who shoots it with such glee that Taiga can't help but laugh. Kasamatsu, keeping pace with him, heaves a sigh. “You and that tiny terror are going to be a problem.”

Kuroko steals the ball off of Kaijou's center and gets it back to Izuki, who routes it to Taiga. It takes him some fancy footwork to shake Kasamatsu and then do that lane-up he'd wanted to do when he first got onto the court. A nice little announcement of his return. 

“ _Going_ to be a problem?” he says to Kasamatsu when he finally catches up at the outside. Kasmatsu gives him a sharp look and mutters something that sounds suspiciously like 'fucking first-years.' Then the court gets a little chaotic for a while. Kise is still a problem with his crazy memory for basketball moves and ability to pull them off like he's been doing them all his life. The kitsune, true to her word, lurks around the edges of the court, no longer tangling Kise's aura with her own. Weird thing is, though, Kise doesn't look any better for it. Taiga and Kuroko move to double mark Kise, because he's still incapable of not taking any bait that Taiga puts out for him, and as he faces off against Kise, he finds a slightly wilted version of the guy who had been giving him nothing but shit talk earlier.

“What, you feeling guilty?” Taiga asks, more surprised than actually trying to goad the guy.

Kise's head comes up like a shot, his nostrils flaring. “ _No_.”

Then he mimic's Taiga's earlier reverse hand break away to try to charge his way down the center of the court, only to find Kuroko ready to guard him at the quarter-court line. There's an odd moment between them where it looks like the pair of them just stop moving entirely, Kise staring down at Kuroko while Kuroko glares back. 'Your tiny partner made a scene,' Taiga recalls watching the pair of them. _Huh_. 

Only one thing for it, Taiga thinks to himself, and steals the ball right as Kise moves to shoot it. There's a three, maybe four, second lag time and then Kise's right there in his face being all blond and cranky. Taiga thinks about passing it out to Izuki, who is clearly waiting for just that, but the way Kise's all flared up and ready to go makes Taiga pause for on that plan for a moment. “You certainly look guilty to me.”

He can all but hear Kise's teeth grinding. Taiga jostles into Kise's guard a little, grinning at the way Kise pulls back like he's been burned. Just to press the issue, he goes for a lay-up over Kise's head, which gets him a small snarl as Kise smacks it out of the air. He catches a flare of gold on the sidelines where Sayoko has her hands fisted in her kimono and is glaring straight at him. The sight of her is enough to derail him for a moment, allowing Kise to do one of his quicksilver dashes to the other side of the court and score right over Tsuchida's head. 

Meeting back up at center court, Kise clearly starting to find his groove and Sayoko all but throwing psychic daggers at him, Taiga is beginning to think that maybe he misjudged their relationship. Just a little bit. Fortunately for him, whatever new drama going on between Kise and Kuroko is still a thing, so he just crowds into Kise's space, jostling him when he goes for a shot, body blocking him when he wants to do a break away, just normal things. But each time he gets too close Kise pulls back like he was made of lava. And promptly looks sideways for Kuroko. It's fucking hilarious. 

It's also, Taiga thinks, a good part of the reason that they manage to win. It's a tight game all the way to the end, but when he goes for a final dunk, Kise moves to block, but falls back despite starting his jump after Taiga. Which is weird, but Taiga'll take the win.

Kise doesn't quite meet his or Kuroko's eyes as they line up to bow. Taiga's not sure, but he thinks there might be tears there. Even Kasamatsu is giving his small forward small, worried frowns as they say their thanks. Honestly, it's more than Taiga can stand. Catching Sayoko's eyes where she stands hovering on the sidelines, practically vibrating with worry, he jerks his chin at Kise. The kitsune all but flies to him, wrapping her arms around him and glaring at Taiga. 

Taiga sucks on his teeth as he watches Kise straighten back up and throw off whatever funk he'd pulled himself into. Kuroko shifts slightly, bumping into Taiga. When he glances down Kuroko flicks a look back up at him that he can't quite read. Damned Teikou players. If it isn't one thing, it's another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry it took me so long to get this chapter out. For some reason I seem to only be able to write this when I'm abroad.


	6. Chapter 6

I'm so, so sorry to do a fake-out like this. But it was pointed out to me that people deserve an explanation:

1) I have not forgotten this fic. In fact I've been thinking about it a lot these past couple months.

2) However, my life exploded. Rather hard. 

3) I've been at Standing Rock Reservation at least one week a month since August, ever since I got back from Russia, helping the Water Protectors defend against DAPL. So, not much time to write and things being kinda ... stressful and a bit on fire. I'm hoping to come back to this fic when things calm down a bit. I'm home now--broken rib and all that--so I've got not much else to do but write my dissertation and this fic. I hope to have this terrible little update replaced with an actual chapter soon. I'm so, so sorry for not saying anything, but, well, not much internet connection at Oceti Sakowin, which is where I've been spending 80% of my time these past couple of months.


	7. When They Died They Left No Instructions, Just a Legacy To Protect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bluh. Sorry for the delay. It's been an intense couple of months.

Kise vanishes almost immediately after the teams bow. Taiga tries to slip off after him, certain that during the immediate confusion after the game—Kaijou's coach loudly demanding that Aida be sure to tell someone named Kagetora that it was a full court game claims nearly everyone's attention—he can slink off without getting spotted, but Hyuuga grabs him into a headlock. “Where do you think you’re going?” he demands over Taiga's muffled protests. “A hospital is where you’re going with that head injury!”

Kuroko coughs lightly, catching a glare from nearly all of the assembled upperclassmen. “I rather doubt that helps his head injury, if it is a problem?”

Hyuuga releases him as if Taiga were made of fire. “He still needs to go to the hospital,” Hyuuga repeats and all of the upperclassmen nod. “Just to be safe.”

Taiga shoots a glance at Kuroko, who just shrugs. He's not sure whether or not he's charmed by their apparent concern for his well-being. The upperclassmen, to a man, appear determined to ensure that he be seen by a doctor—regardless of his feelings on the matter. “I swear I feel fine,” he says again in the vague hope this gets him somewhere. It doesn’t.

Hyuuga glowers and shakes his head. Even normally easy-going Tsuchida looks determined to physically haul him off to the doctor, if that’s what it takes, so Taiga just gives in. Aida notices them packing up and simply walks off in the middle of Kaijou coach's haranguing. The man crosses his arms over his chest with a harrumphing sigh that flutters his bangs, but lets her go. It's sort of the way things tended to fall out around Aida, Taiga thinks, people largely just getting the hell out of her way.

“Are we taking him to the hospital now?” Aida says to Hyuuga, as if Taiga weren't standing right there. She catches the sleeve of his jacket when he tries to sidle around her, but doesn't even bother to look at him while she keeps him effectively trapped there. “I'd like to just be sure.”

Hyuuga nods. “He keeps trying to scuttle off, but that was my plan. There's a small sports medicine clinic on the way back that we could stop at, I think.”

“Sasagawa General Hospital is on your way, Aida,” announces the Kaijou coach looking as blustery as before, not even remotely deflated. The man shuffles slightly as Aida eyes him. “If you’re that worried about your player.” He looks Taiga up and down. “Not sure you need to worry about that one, though.”

Taiga wouldn't swear to it, but it feels like Aida's shoulders hunch up just a bit about that before she replies. “I just want to be safe.”

The Kaijou coach makes a small humming noise. “I suppose you would at that. Well, you know your way out? Yes? Great. Get out of my gym.”

Aida flashes the man a smile that shows him all of her teeth and he just harrumphs another one of those bulldog sighs at her. She herds them all out of the gym easily enough, collaring Kuroko as he stares off to where Kise had disappeared behind the building. “If you're that worried about him,” she says to him while still marching towards the Kaijou school gates, “you can text him.”

Kuroko makes a face that Taiga can't read. Whatever is going on between him and Kise, it's essentially claimed all of Kuroko's focus, because he follows along after them without a word—only pausing once to peer thoughtfully back the way they had come. Taiga jostles him lightly, just to get a reaction, and Kuroko shoots him a small smile and a shrug. Taiga kinda wonders if the drama between him and Kise is the reason he's such a mess about basketball in general, but it's not like he can exactly ask if ninety percent of Kuroko's problems are due to some sort of dramatic, bad break-up.

And, honestly, Taiga's pretty sure he doesn't want to know.

The team is far more subdued that Taiga would've expected given that they'd just won a pretty hard game against a nationally ranked team. A practice game, but _still_. The silence, broken only by the occasional murmured comment, eats at him a bit—makes him more boisterous than he would otherwise be just to try to break the pall. It makes Hyuuga roll his eyes at Aida, who shakes her head.

When they get to the hospital, Hyuuga turns to Aida with one eyebrow raised. She takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders and then all but hauls him bodily into the emergency entrance, leaving the rest of the team to lurk outside. Taiga goes along without any complaint because he doesn't really know where to start with all the weird. “I feel fine,” he says as they check in. “Promise.”

“We need to be sure,” Aida says like it’s a mantra, her mouth tight. He follows her to the little waiting room and tries to stuff himself into one the entirely too tiny chairs. Aida settles herself next to him, fidgeting with the beaded bracelets around her wrist.

He watches her from the corner of his eyes for a bit, trying to find a delicate way of asking before just spitting out, “Are you okay?”

Aida glances at him quickly and then goes back to staring at the clock on the far wall like she can will time to move faster. “I don't like hospitals.”

Taiga cocks his head to the side to study her. “Yeah, me neither.”

That gets her to turn and consider in him in earnest. It's hard for him to take her suddenly compassionate expression or the way that she gently pats his hand. “I have a lot of bad memories,” she says so softly he can barely hear it, “of sitting in waiting rooms.”

It costs her something to admit to that, Taiga can tell. The way that she hunches in on herself, the way that her voice gets whisper soft, all suggests that it's beyond hard for her to admit to that. He isn't sure if it’s just the demonstration of vulnerability in general, or opening herself up like that with him in specific, but regardless—he can't just sit there and let her do all the work. “My mom died in a hospital,” he tells her, and is pretty pleased when his voice doesn't shake even when her mouth drops into that distressed 'o' that people tend to make. “So I don't like 'em much either.”

Aida looks away from him, down at where her hand lays over his. She pats his hand again. “This will be fast,” she promises like she has any sort of control over the situation. “We'll be in and out of here before you know it.”

They aren't, not by any stretch of the imagination. The sun is sitting low on the horizon sending out ruddy, golden streaks along the skyline and throwing long shadows of the buildings across the streets when she and Taiga finally manage to escape. The doctor had been annoyingly thorough, Taiga thought crankily. Breaking out all kinds of fussy little instruments to make sure he hadn't actually cracked his head open.

“He shone a flashlight in your eyes,” Aida says, the words 'you big baby' left unspoken but clearly implied, when he complains (whines) about it. “And asked a couple of questions.”

“Did you really have to suggest an MRI?” Taiga snipes back at her as they make their way to their waiting team. “Because that was just unnecessary.”

She just rolls her eyes expressively at him before turning to present him to the team. “His head is apparently too hard to damage,” Aida announces to the assembled team, which Taiga thinks is an unfair way of phrasing it. “He has a clean bill of health.”

Taiga's a little touched at how relieved the upperclassmen look at that. Apparently, Japanese teams take injuries way more seriously than any of his teams back home did. Aida reaches up to grab the back of his head and pulls him into a rough bow. “You should apologize for worrying us,” she says with one hand buried in his hair, but her voice is amused. “Where are your manners?”

He lets her guide him through a bow and mumbles what he remembers of a formal apology. When he straightens back up, Hyuuga regards him with something that looks like wry affection. “He needs civilizing,” he says to Aida who just shrugs. Taiga wills himself not to react to that, because god. they can’t possibly know how that sounds. Apparently he does a good job because Hyuuga keeps talking, looking both worried and irritated at the same time. “Well, that's one first-year accounted for, but Kuroko's wandered off and we didn't want to go searching for him until you came back.”

“I'm going to wring his neck,” Aida says so faintly Taiga almost thinks he imagines it. She blinks at the sun setting on the horizon. “I'm going to wring it like a chicken.”

So much for hoping that she was above incorporating corporal punishment into her tricks for dealing with wayward basketball players, Taiga thinks with a faint sigh. “I'll go look for him.” That earns him identical skeptical looks from his captain _and_ his coach, which is a little intimidating, Taiga isn't gonna lie. “I mean, when we all do? I feel fine. Um.”

He peters off under Aida's withering look and stands there awkwardly until she heaves a sigh. “We'll split up and all look.” The look of flinty irritation she turns on Taiga is, he feels, entirely unwarranted given the fact that he's not the one that's wandered off without so much as a word. “We'll all meet up at the station.”

How he manages to finagle his way into searching solo, Taiga's not sure, but he'll take it. He needs a little time to himself to try to put the events of the day in order. There's so much it feels like he's lived a week, a month, in the span of a couple of hours. So much bullshit inside of one day that really did not need as much bullshit as had occurred. And the day wasn't even over, Taiga realizes with dawning horror, because he'd promised to contact Coyote. _Fuck_ his life.

He doesn't really know Kuroko well enough to get an idea of where to search for him, so Taiga just kinda wanders about aimlessly and hopes that he doesn't get too lost. The Kanagawa area is a pretty suburb of Tokyo with picturesque little apartment buildings, houses with tiny courtyards, and a basketball court so well-maintained that it takes Taiga moment to recognize it. He doesn't even really pay it much mind until a flash of gold catches his attention. And there, of course, is Kuroko talking to Kise as if the entirety of the Seirin team weren't out searching for him.

Taiga stomps over to the pair of them, feeling much abused and thinking extremely unkind things about Kuroko and his apparent ex-boyfriend problems.

In his mind it's pretty much all Kise's fault that he got hauled off to the hospital in the first place and then it's Kuroko's fault all their senpai are hopping mad and twitchy as hell. He's of a mind to take the pair of them and crack their heads together, except that they both seem so tense and desperately unhappy that he slows down his murder stomp towards them—hoping against hope that they sort their shit out before he actually gets there.

They don't, naturally.

He can just barely hear the murmur of their voices when he clears the corner of the street court—Kuroko’s tense rage and Kise’s lilting sarcasm. It takes him back, like a punch to the gut, when he hears Kise say, “One day you and Kagami will grow apart—you know you will, Kuroko-chi, so don’t act so attached now.” Because, no matter whatever other bullshit Kise has been spouting (and clearly there’s been bullshit because Kuroko looks about two seconds from punching Kise in the mouth, which Taiga isn’t quite sure he’d really mind) that part is true. Not a think Taiga really wants to think about though. He’s about to bust in, rattle Kise’s chain a little, when he feels delicate arms slide around his shoulders like the kiss of cherry blossoms.

“Not wrong, is he, my Kise-chan,” Sayoko murmurs against the curve of his ear. “One day, coming not too soon, you will grow apart from your little team. It happens to all onmyouji one day. Your power is just too frightening.”

Her sweet voice sounds too much like Taiga’s own fears for comfort, so he doesn’t bother with responding. He shrugs her off and stomps towards Kuroko with her laughter following him like smoke. Taiga body checks him, jostling Kuroko a little harder than he originally intended. It annoys Taiga even more when Kuroko stumbles a bit, clearly surprised by his sudden appearance. He’s working on biting back that flood of irritation, because his fear isn’t Kuroko’s fault—he _knows_ this—when Kise just has to decide to open his big goddamned mouth.

“Were you listening?” Kise asks with something like a smirk pulling on the corners of his mouth.

“Of course I was fucking listening,” Taiga says before he can get his brain to engage. “Where the fuck do you get off, kidnapping Kuroko for some sort of weird ex-boyfriend, passive-aggressive bullshit?”

“I…wait, _what_?” Kise looks so honestly flabbergasted that Taiga takes a moment to revise his analysis. Maybe not ex-boyfriends. But still weird and still bullshit. 

“Whatever,” Taiga snaps. “We can’t go home without the little shit because coach Aida keeps talking about responsibility—and you are in deep shit with her—“ he says as an aside to Kuroko, looks faintly alarmed. Which he damned well should be, “—and won’t leave without him, which is your fault. Just like the fact that I got hauled off to the damned doctor because of you.”

“Kagami-kun is fine then?” Kuroko breaks into his rant just as Taiga hits his stride and well before Kise can manage to stop making fish out of water impressions. 

Taiga blinks for a second, thrown by Kuroko’s unusually solicitous tone. “Yeah. No concussion or anything.”

“Ah,” Kuroko says so softly that it’s just a whisper of air. Taiga thinks that he looks relieved, but who the hell really knows what’s going on inside that uncommunicative little shit’s head.

There could have been a moment, or at least a chance for Taiga to try to get Kuroko to spit out whatever is eating at him, but Kise—again, because gods forbid that a second go by without Kise being the center of attention—opens his mouth up. “I told you that he was just fine.”

Kuroko’s mouth goes flatter than a board and he just blinks at Kise twice. If it were anyone else, Taiga would have expected Words, but Kuroko just keeps eye contact with the blond until he shuffles his feet in chagrined silence. Honestly, Taiga feels like he’s had entirely enough of the Kuroko & Kise show, because fuck their weird bullshit, he has to go smudge up Coyote before the evening’s end (what is his _life_?) or there’ll be hell to pay. He doesn’t have time for this crap.

“Yeah, no thanks to you,” Taiga gripes at Kise just to break the staring contest. 

“I didn’t mean to hit you,” Kise retorts hotly. “It’s your fault for being behind me like that. You should have taken a foul.”

“For what? I thought you were the one that was a member of the all-mighty ‘generation of miracles’ or some shit,” Taiga returns just to rile him up some. Just to have someone to yell at. “Shouldn’t you be able to tell where people are on the court?”

Kise’s nostrils flare as his eyes narrow into tight, angry slits. Whatever he was going to say gets lost in the sudden noise on the street courts, which, of course there’s some new problem. Of course there is. Taiga barely notices when Kise moves to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as a group of assholes hassle the guys who had been playing a pretty tidy pick-up game earlier. Taiga has to admit, he likes Kise a lot better when he makes a low, angry noise in the back of his throat as the assholes cheat their way to a win. 

Taiga’s about to turn to Kuroko to see about maybe doing something about the gaggle of jackasses trying to take over the court—humiliate them a five versus two or something—when he finds Kuroko conspicuously absent. A bell, Taiga thinks briefly, he’s fitting the little shit with a bell.

“Aw, _shit_ ,” Kise mutters, and, yep, there’s Kuroko mouthing off like he’s about a meter taller and twenty kilos heavier. Taiga kinda wants to ask if this is just Kuroko’s normal—picking fights that he can’t hope to win—or if this is a new thing. The way Kise’s swearing under his breath as he makes a dash around the chain link fence makes Taiga think that this is just Kuroko’s normal. It’s like someone decided that sticking twenty pounds of attitude in a five-pound bag and then calling it a boy was a good idea.

It wasn’t, Taiga’d like to note, a good idea. 

It’s not the first time that Taiga’s grateful that the gods had seen fit to make him nearly 6’4’’ with flaming hair. Makes providing emergency back-up for the tiny smartasses he knows—god, both his coach _and_ his partner, _fuck_ his life—a helluva lot easier. He contrives to look as tall and intimidating as he knows how while Kise manages to turn a polite request into a low-key threat. If the hand Taiga drops onto Kuroko’s head is heavy, and he shakes Kuroko’s head just a little bit in warning—well, no one seems to notice. Kuroko just slants a look at him from the corner of his eyes with a small, smug smile playing on his lips.

Taiga’s already good and pissed off—today has been so epically full of bullshit—so when the group of assholes try to bluster their way out of the little basketball duel Kise sets up, he locks them all with a level stare. He can feel his head lower like a bull’s getting ready to gore someone. They take one look at him, at Kuroko’s polite neutrality, and Kise’s smiling threat and decide that playing a little basketball is by far the lesser evil.

The game goes as games with Kuroko always go: weird, unsettling, and with them winning for reasons that defy logic or the actual rules of the game. But playing with Kise instead of against him is a treat. Where Kuroko is all sober seriousness, Kise is golden ball of easy laughter. There’s an edge to it, sure, but there’s still a core of joy in Kise’s game. Whatever happened to the pair of them in high school, it didn’t make Kise turn around and try to use basketball as a stick to make a point with.

The trio of guys who’d been playing when he first arrived regards them all with something like awe when he trots over to hand the ball. Taiga would’ve thought Kise’d be all about that type of adulation, but he doesn’t even spare them a glance from where he’s low-key yelling at Kuroko.

Which is good, Taiga thinks, he can use all the help he can get trying to beat some common sense into Kuroko’s thick head. At least a sense of self-preservation, that’d be nice. 

“So,” he says as he walks up to the pair of them, drawling out the vowel. “Just what were you planning on doing if we hadn’t been there to bail out your ass?”

“But you were here,” Kuroko points out with infinite reasonableness. Taiga’s pretty impressed when Kise’s back teeth don’t crack from how hard he’s grinding them. Which is fair, really, because he’s thinking fond thoughts of shaking Kuroko until the little shit’s teeth fall out.

“But if we weren’t?” he asks again. He’s played this game before; he knows how it goes.

“I would have gotten beaten up,” Kuroko replies blithely. “Completely.”

Kise’s making a noise that sounds slightly like a tea kettle about to boil—a faint, high hiss promising an explosion. Taiga rubs his hands over his mouth as he studies Kuroko’s polite face of innocent helpfulness. 

Kuroko lifts one skinny arm and flexes. “Look at these guns.”

“You haven’t got any,” Taiga snaps without thinking. Kuroko gives him a small smile, just a tiny quirk of the lips, and Taiga gets the strong impression he is getting played. Again. 

“Argh,” Kise half shouts, half snarls, throwing up his hands in frustration. “I don’t know why I … When you just …” Kise rakes his hands through his hair, making it stand up in angry blond tufts. Kuroko turns that small smile on Kise. Somehow, even though there isn’t so much as a tell-tale twinkle in his blue eyes, Taiga thinks Kuroko feels incredibly pleased with himself. Why, Taiga doesn’t really know. 

Taiga cocks his head to the side, a thought suddenly occurring to him. “Do you wind us up like this just to prove to yourself that we care?” he asks—more thinking through the idea outloud than really expecting any sort of response. “Because it’s really not necessary.”

Kuroko just blinks at him slowly, a faint line forming between his brows. Taiga thinks that while Kuroko is pretty good at reading other people, he’s not so used to them reading him. Maybe no one has really ever tried. That’s a thought that makes Taiga sigh. He waves his hands in front of him, as if clearing the air. “Just a thought, never mind.”

Kise eyes him with a new sort of thoughtfulness that honestly Taiga wouldn’t have expected from the blond. “Not so oblivious as he seems, is he?” he says to Kuroko while still giving Taiga a look like he’s a problem to solve. 

“No,” Kuroko replies with an undertone that Taiga can’t quite figure out—pride and regret mushed around together in ways that he’s just not equipped to untangle. “He’s not what you would expect.”

It means something to the two of them. Taiga would feel insulted, like he’s the butt of a joke or something, but it’s obvious that there’s some reference going on that he just isn’t going to get. Kise sighs and rubs at the back of his head. “Well,” he comments, that light, nearly flippant tone back in his voice. “At least I got to play with you again. It was … educational as always.”

“Educational?” Kuroko asks, head cocked to the side like a puppy presented with a new thing. 

“Yeah,” Kise replies without any hint that he intends to expand upon that. He rolls his shoulders like he’s shifting a weight off of them. “But you’re going to have to work a bit, you know, if you want to beat Midoramacchi. That left hand of his is no joke, particularly on days that are good for Cancers.”

Kuroko makes a face that is, frankly, _hilarious_ —a scrunched up ball of displeasure that is so over done that Taiga’s pretty sure that his next words are nothing but ridiculous lies. “I really do not get along well with Midorima-san,” Kuroko sighs. 

Taiga chooses to interpret this as meaning one of two things: either Kuroko is an incredible little shit to whoever this poor dude is and the dude falls for it constantly; or Kuroko tries to be an incredible little shit to whoever this poor dude is and the dude calls him on it constantly. Honestly, at this point Taiga is kinda impressed that there is anyone that Kuroko gets along with well, given his pot-stirring tendencies. 

Kise just laughs, as if Kuroko’s answer was expected. “Yeah, well, he says the same thing about you.” Kuroko makes another over done face at that, making both Kise and Taiga snicker. “He came to see me after our practice game.” Kise shrugs one shoulder, so casual and nonchalant that it’s obvious from space that he’s anything but. “He was, you know, Midoramacchi,” Kuroko nods as if this was some sort of reasonable description given by reasonable people, “but he did say that you guys would be facing off during the prelims, so be careful about that. He’ll only have gotten stronger since middle school.”

“Midorima-san is very diligent,” Kuroko says with such a neutral tone that it can only be shade.

“And the school he’s going to is known for, you know, hard work, dedication, practice, blah, blah, blah,” Kise replies, and again there’s some sort of undertone—a joke between the two of them—that Taiga just can’t crack.

Kuroko sighs. “Of course, it is. I imagine it is also well-ranked, but not particularly, ah….” Kuroko lets his voice trail off, and once upon a time Taiga might have even thought Kuroko was being tactful instead of sarcastic little snot.

“Flashy?” Kise suggests, with a weird overtone of self-awareness. “Ostentatious? Grandiose and ridiculous? Yeah, well,” Kise says with unexpected seriousness. “It’s not like any of us really went outside of comfort zones, did we?”

The expression that flits across Kuroko’s face, almost too fast for Taiga to catch, is a new one for the catalogue—and he’s pretty sure this is expression Kuroko wears when he is well and truly pissed the fuck off. “Ah,” Kuroko sighs lightly. “It’s like not he ordered us to do so, did he? Just that we go to different schools.”

Kise makes an abortive hand gesture, something caught between trying to ward off a blow and trying to hush someone, before dropping his hand. “Could you, just maybe, try picking just one fight at a time?”

The dying light of the setting sun glitters queerly off Kuroko’s eyes for a moment. “I only have the one.”

All right, Taiga decides, he’s had enough of their collective melodrama and secretive angst. “That’s all very vague and not at all ominous,” he says, enjoying with only a little bit of malicious pleasure the way Kise and Kuroko jump at his sudden interjection. “But we need to get back to our coach before she decides to flay us alive.”

“She wouldn’t,” Kuroko replies, mostly Taiga thinks to be contrary.

“Do you want to put money on that?” he asks curiously. Because sometimes Kuroko gets his back up in weird places.

The corner of Kuroko’s mouth quirks slightly. “Not even remotely.”

Kise’s watching the pair of them like an avid tennis fan and grins when he realizes that Taiga’s noticed. “Well, that sounds like my cue to leave,” he says, dusting off his pants with exaggerated movements. He favors them with a model-perfect grin. “It was fun to play with you guys.”

Taiga watches him trot off towards wherever he called home and suddenly feels enormously awkward around Kuroko now that it’s just the two of them. Whatever he wanted to say to Kuroko has suddenly flown from his head so fast that it almost feels like there should be a vapor trail. The day has been enormously weird. He mentally rewinds it to see if there’s anything that is immediately pressing.   
“You don’t have to worry about me leaving you, you know,” he blurts out. Kuroko turns to blink up at him, his face a study in blank confusion. Taiga waves his hands around some, like that will help illustrate his point. “I mean, unless I move back to the States or something. But I wouldn’t be leaving because of you.”

“I have never thought that Taiga would leave because of me,” Kuroko says with exaggerated slowness. Taiga jostles him until he sighs a little. “Besides, I will always stay near the—oof.”

Taiga nearly bowls Kuroko over swatting him. “No. Bad Kuroko.”

That earns him a deeply disapproving scowl. “But my style of play— _stop_ that.”

Taiga shoves Kuroko again, despite his attempts to ward off the attack. “Nope.”

Kuroko sighs again and gives him a look like he would definitely like to stick his hands on his hips. “You haven’t even bothered to—now that was just being rude,” he complains as Taiga hip checks him.

“Yep,” Taiga says with his own cheerful smile. “Also, not gonna listen to what you were about to say because it was some bullshit. Grade A even.”

“Kagama-kun, if you would just liste--.” Kuroko growls impressively when Taiga shoves him again, grinning unrepentantly all the while.

“Bull,” he says in the face of Kuroko’s indignant rage, “shit.”

“Kagami-kun is a _child_ ,” Kuroko says with what Taiga imagines he thinks is offended dignity. It sounds more like the whine of the defeated to Taiga, which he can deal with just fine.

Kuroko is so frustrated with him that they don’t speak for the remaining hike to the station, which is fine with Taiga. He’s pretty done with Kuroko and his various bits of crazy for the day. Up to his metaphorical fill line, stick a fork in him, turn off the oven, Taiga Kagami is done with Kuroko and his damage at least for the next 24 hours. He presents Kuroko to their fuming coach without flourish, just shoving him in front of her before he can slink off into the train without being spotted.

Taiga won’t lie; it’s deeply satisfying when she promptly throws Kuroko in some sort of wrestling move, snarling like an incensed mother badger all the while. 

The rest of the team accept them back into their ranks without comment, everyone seeming content to simply not be on the receiving end of their coach’s ire. The train ride back to Tokyo proper is definitely more boisterous than the near-funeral march to the hospital had been, with Koganei loudly reliving the highlights of the game to Hyuuga’s obvious mortification. Apparently, Taiga had missed Hyuuga’s epic moment of upperclassmen-reliability or something. 

Aida manages to wedge herself between the train doors and Taiga, which effectively traps him there because if he moves, she’ll be crushed by all the people (most of whom were trying to avoid Koganei’s flailing around). She gives him a cat-caught-the-canary smile and he kisses goodbye any thought of sneaking away. 

“Thank you for finding Kuroko-kun,” she says, making him blink in surprise, because that was not the conversation starter that he was expecting. 

“You’re welcome,” he says, with only a little bit of a question in his voice. 

“Where did you find him?” she asks. Taiga searches her face for some indication of where the hell this conversation is going, but only gets Aida’s version of bland politeness. He sighs.

“At a local basketball court. With Kise.”

That startles a laugh out of her, a high clear burst of sound that really shouldn’t fill him with as much dread as it does. “Of course you did.”

He decides to settle for venting, because of Aida doesn’t get it no one will. “I know, right? The two of them are kinda weird about each other.”

She makes an agreeing sort of hum, but doesn’t bother to elaborate as she continues to study him. “You two have gotten pretty close, I think.” Taiga would like to argue that statement on general principles—those being ‘fuck’ and ‘no’ to Kuroko’s general bullshit—but the high arch of one her eyebrows suggests that she both already knows his objections and doesn’t think much of them. “It’s good that you care for him, and that you are looking out for him, but is anyone looking out for you?”

That presses all the breath out of him like he just landed from a great height and his eyes prickle with a familiar itchy feeling. He jerks his gaze off her to stare out the window, chewing on the inside of his lip. “I’m _fine_.”

Aida makes on her agreeing hums again, but runs light fingers along the side of the arm that he braced against the train wall to keep them from been squashed by the press of people. He flicks a look back down at her to find her staring back at him a faint line between her eyes. “Are you?” she asks with a gentleness that threatens to undo him. “You are allowed to ask for help, if you aren’t.”

Someone, Taiga thinks distantly, needs to teach this girl that there is a time and place for conversations that lance through a person’s heart, and a crowded train is not one of them. “I’m. _Fine_.”

Aida sighs, her fingers falling from his arm. She turns from him as the doors open to their stop without a word, but Taiga finds himself struck by how tiny she is, the line of her shoulders suddenly looks very fragile. For a moment he wants to call out to her, apologize or something, but the rush of other passengers sweeps them down the station stairs and out onto the street, and the moment is past like so much water through a sieve. 

\--

He finds himself thinking about it the entire walk home, worrying at it like a dog with a bone. His behavior sits poorly with him. Taiga doesn’t like the idea that he’s been … unkind to someone who had been trying to be kind to him. But at the same time he can’t see a way to explain or even come close to explaining, all of the crazy of his current situation. He scrubs his hands against his eyes trying to will himself out of the circle of anxiety over his behavior. 

Taiga pulls up short before the stairs to his apartment, staring up the steps at Sayoko, who returns his regard with a flat look and a dainty sniff. “Are you going to stay down there all evening, or are you going to let me in?”

Taiga runs hand down his face and then through his hair before breathing slowly through his nose and out his mouth. He climbs the stairs deliberately, taking his time to reach the landing where Sayoko waits for him with ill-grace. “Generally, it is considered polite to give one’s host advanced notice before visiting.”

Sayoko waves this away with one pale hand tipped with blood-red nail polish—a new addition to her look, Taiga thinks. “Generally,” she says with the same officious tone. “One keeps one’s associates from eating one’s companions.” She wrinkles her nose in a distressingly cute way. “One thinks.”

Taiga finds himself laughing softly as he turns the lock on his door. “Does one?”

“One does,” Sayoko says with a little nod that sets all her glittering hairpins tinkling. The effect is charming, which he suspects she knows. He steps aside to allow her to float through the door—literally he notices, as her geta clad feet do not deign to touch the earth—and inspect the entry way. She turns with one sharp eyebrow raised in question. 

He steps through the entry way and closes the door behind him, then blinks to find himself nearly pressed chest to chest with her. Sayoko smiles coquettishly up at him, gazing up at him through the dark sweep of her eyelashes. Taiga can feel the sigh he heaves rattle through him like a freight train. “Can I take the lady’s, uh, wrap thing?”

That earns him a laugh and a smile that almost looks real before she turns and just lets the heavy outer jacket-kimono-thing she’s got wrapped around herself fall to the floor. He catches it before it can hit the ground, and then nearly drops it again, surprised at its weight. “How do you not roast in this thing?”

Sayoko smiles so broadly both sets of her canines show. “Magic.”

Taiga rolls his eyes. “Of course.” 

She inspects his apartment with the same air of gleeful disregard for his privacy as Sei and Rei, and Taiga finds himself wondering if he’s just damned to some sort of very specific hell where all things canine take an inordinate interest in him. It’s enough to make a person skeptical of the entire genus. When she finishes poking her way through all of his things, she settles herself in his living room like a queen expecting to be attended. 

“Is there a type of tea you prefer, or will genmacha be acceptable?” he asks, not bothering to move from where he’s leaning against the counter that’s all that separates his living room from the kitchen. 

The smile he gets is indulgent and brings out a pair of dimples on Sayoko’s cheeks. “Such begrudging hospitality! Genmacha would be most welcome.”

Taiga just nods and turns his back on her, busying himself with making tea while his mind races a million miles a minute. Unfortunately, basic genmacha takes far too little time to give him any space to either collect his thoughts or deduce what in heck Sayoko could possible want with him now. 

He catches himself before he slams down the tea service, which would've probably broken the damned thing and irritated his father—if his father actually ever shows up again—and places it carefully on the coffee table before Sayoko. He doesn’t look at her while he settles himself into a comfortable cross-legged seat, not quite trusting the expression his face is probably making. Taiga focuses on serving the genmacha, wondering briefly if the heavy mugs are the wrong type of cup to use or Sayoko will just find it endearing, before shaking off the idle worry. He sets one steaming mug in front of Sayoko, then settles back with his own, letting the steam drift across his face as he stares into the deep green depths.

“Looking for a stem?” Sayoko asks, one eyebrow cocked. Her thin hands barely wrap all the way around the mug, and when she lifts it to take a drink, it completely hides her face. 

Taiga blinks at her. “Looking for a what?”

She regards him for a long moment, then tucks her feet up underneath her. Cradling her mug to her chest, she runs one finger along its top. “Humans sometimes think that finding a tea leaf stem floating straight up and down in the tea is good luck.”

“Oh.” Taiga looks down at his mug reflexively. “Nope, no stem.”

“Pity, you could use good luck,” she says with a laugh.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” he hears himself say before the words even flicker across the internal screen of his mind. He winces briefly, because god dammit, mouth. 

That makes her laugh hard enough that little laugh lines appear around the sides of her eyes. She dabs at them daintily with the edge of her kimono sleeve. “Ah, you are a delight, onmyouji.”

Taiga heaves a sigh. Now he’s got another preternatural canine calling him a shaman. Great. “I’m glad that I’m entertaining, but could you tell me why the hell you are here?”

God dammit. Him and his run away mouth. 

“You are fortunate that your surly demeanor is part of your appeal,” Sayoko says, grinning at him with open delight. Taiga doesn’t know what to do with this any more than he knows what to do with the general mess his life has become, so he just sighs again. Sayoko’s laugh rings through the room, the undercurrent of a fox’s yipping threading through it makes the hair raise on the back of Taiga’s neck. “I am here to apologize to your master.”

“My what now?” Taiga asks with his mouth hanging open. He’s pretty sure his eyes are trying to bug out of his head. 

“Is that not what you call him?” Sayoko asks, her eyes wide and guileless. “Oh, I am sorry.”

Taiga pinches the bridge of his noses and breathes slowly in through his nose and out through his mouth before setting his mug on the coffee table. He cocks his head as he considers Sayoko and her pretty eyes framed with dark lashes. He can feel his mouth go flat as a board. 

Without saying anything to her, he stands up and heads to his room. He can hear her chortling to herself softly. At least one of them is enjoying themselves. It takes him a moment to find the bundle of white sage, still looking as perfect as the day Coyote first foisted it off on him. Taiga stares at it for a moment and then rubs at his temples. Taking care not to crush the sage, he marches back to the living room.

Sayoko regards him curiously, a faint wrinkle marring her otherwise perfect brow. “Incense?”

“ _Ts’ah_ ,” Taiga corrects before gently singeing the edges, sending up a great plume of smoke. Far more than such a tiny bundle and a tiny flame should make. The smell of sage chases away the beginnings of his headache, and he breathes it in deeply, revealing for a moment in the nostalgic scent. Bringing the sage to his forehead he brushes it up and over him four times before turning and sending it to the four corners of the room. The smoke uncurls in the air, lazy tendrils exploring the room before settling low and moving in slow currents only it understands.

Taiga gently damps the leaves and rewraps them with the bit of deer hide Coyote had gifted him long ago. Then he stands there and tries very hard not to shift from foot to foot while Sayoko watches him with avid interest. Because this is definitely not the way he had been taught to use ts’ah. No one had ever mentioned that it could be used to summon elder gods through the Fourth World—how that works Taiga doesn’t want consider—to the other side of a god damned ocean.

Summoning in general wasn’t a thing he’d been taught. He’d asked about it, once, when he’d been much younger and the amount of uproarious laughter it had provoked from his elders ensured that he’d never brought it up again. He still remembers his mom’s lightening flash smile and her hand ruffling his hair after he’d asked. Taiga mentally pokes at the memory, the image of the long sweep of his mother’s hair, the silver and lapis lazuli on her wrists, and is surprised to find it hurts less than he was expecting. A dull throb of longing instead of the sudden stab despair.

He gives into the memory for a moment, forgetting Sayoko on the couch and the sounds of Tokyo outside his window to think about his mother. Her hands moving through his hair, carding it back and forth like sheep’s wool, and her low laugh. “Nothing comes because you demand it, Tahwa. You can call, but only their own hearts can make them answer.”

Taiga blinks, the solution suddenly presenting itself in surprising simplicity. Coyote had said something similar, last time. That he had been called by Taiga’s own longing. At the time Taiga had written it off as Coyote grandstanding and teasing him at the same time, but perhaps there was something more to it. It was hard to miss Coyote himself, but all the things Coyote represents? That he misses. 

Taiga misses the desert and the way it smells of heat and thunder during the summer. He misses frybread and wandering the vendor stalls at the intertribal powpows that travel up and down the coast. He misses the aunties who pressed flatbread tacos into his hands. He misses his cousins with their long braids and crooked smiles and the way they teased him for cutting his hair. 

He takes the wave of longing and homesickness that rises up and threatens to sink him like a tiny boat on stormy seas and crafts it into one long undulating call. Coyote’s name, one of them at least, sung into the dark. Taiga, against every rational bone in his body, can feel it when Coyote hears him. He has a dizzying and dislocating vision of Coyote raising his head from some sunbaked rock and cocking his ears. 

Taiga squeezes his eyes shut against the roil of vertigo and grinds his palms against them. He can feel Coyote walk the long path through the Fourth World, following Taiga’s call like a road laid out just for him. Vertigo and nausea force him to his knees so he’s sitting back on his heels, Sayoko just starting to rise from the couch, her brow furrowed with worry, when Coyote pulls aside the barrier between the worlds like it’s nothing at all. 

“Ànaaì,” Taiga says by way of greeting as Coyote pulls the swirling smoke of the _ts’ah_ into a suitable form. Taiga squeezes his eyes shut again, trying to will the double image away. “I just want to say, this shouldn’t have worked and I am very upset.”

Coyote just laughs his nightmare laugh that scrapes down Taiga’s spine like knives of ice. “And yet it did! Ah, átsilì, you will need to learn to be more flexible in the future. Life is a dance, and who are the dancers that delight the best?”

Taiga thinks of the fancy dancers and their repertoire of moves—built, collected, and modified over time—passed down from one to another, always different but still the same. He sighs. “The ones who adapt.”

“Just so,” Coyote not-quite chides. “But the call was done well. The path was laid out with great care!”

“Thank you, ánaaì,” Taiga murmurs as he watches Coyote’s smoke-shape prowl around the room. The smoke drifting from Coyote’s paws, his tail, the tips of his pointed ears, lingers on the edges of things—the coffee table, the arm of the couch where Sayoko remains perched with eyes alight with fascination, the long-forgotten tea service. Part of Taiga rebels against this—against the idea that _ts’ah_ can be used in such a fashion—but the rest of him is just too damned tired to fuss about it. Calling up Coyote through use of sage just becomes One More Damned Thing that works because it’s Coyote—logical thought plays little to no part in it. 

“So,” Coyote says once he has inspected the room to his satisfaction. “Why is your little fox friend here?”

Taiga can see Sayoko suck in her cheeks, her mouth puckering like she’d just taken a bit of a winter lemon, and sighs again. “She wished to make amends for this afternoon.”

Coyote’s smoke form roils for a moment, semi-dissolving into eddying ripples, until it snaps back into the shape of desert coyote. He pricks his ears towards Sayoko, who hasn’t moved a millimeter. “Is that so? Such manners from your friend!”

“I’m not sure I could call her a friend,” Taiga says as he kneads his temples. “I only just learned her name today.”

“And yet here she sits sipping her tea as if you have been fast friends for years!” Coyote laughs, before walking through the coffee table, the smoke swirling under and around it before resettling into Coyote’s preferred shape. Taiga has to give Sayoko credit; she doesn’t even flinch when Coyote leaps onto the couch beside her—tendrils of smoke lingering in the air like little banners marking his passage. “You do wish to be friends, don’t you?” he asks Sayoko, with only the faintest edges of a threat lingering in his voice. 

Sayoko flicks her eyes to him for a half-heartbeat of a moment. Taiga shrugs one shoulder and sips his tea. 

“I do,” she responds—her shoulders straightening into tense line. “Or at least allies for the time being.”  
“Time being what?” Coyote asks, with his head cocked winsomely. “Time has no being.”

Taiga throws a pillow at him, making his smoky form scatter as the incoming missile tumbles through it. His disembodied laughter is creepier than normal as the smoke slowly pulls itself together into his form. “Stop being difficult,” Taiga tells him. “We have problems here.”

“There are problems across the world,” Coyote responds easily. “They breed like little, fat rabbits and yet fail to give any satisfaction when you sink your teeth into them.”

Taiga gives Coyote a narrow-eyed look. “This particular fluffy bunny looks like one that’s been bred by you specifically.”

Coyote wraps his tail around his forepaws, thin banners of smoke rippling in the air after it. Despite being made of nothing but shadows and smoke, his teeth manage to look very sharp in his spreading grin. “Oh?”

Taiga drops into a cross-legged seat and let his hands fall onto his knees with a heavy thud. “Maybe,” he replies, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “It seems like something out of one the stories about you.” Taiga makes a little wobbling hand motion in the air. “If someone took it way too literally and then gave it power.” He scowls at the ceiling for a moment. “And a weird sense of humor.”

“Taiga,” Coyote remarks softly, as his tail lazily waves through the air. “I do believe you are rambling.”

Taiga closes his eyes against the oncoming headache. He is rambling. The words tumbling out of him as if somewhere in that mess a nice, logical explanation for all this bullshit would present itself. “When you accidentally made—“

“I have no accidents,” Coyote corrects sharply. Taiga restrains himself from rolling his eyes.

“When you made the obsidian-eyed men, which was in no way an accident,” Taiga continues. “Did any of them … get free?”

Coyote cocks his head. Taiga is dimly aware of Sayoko’s rapt, if thoroughly confused, attention upon them both. “All of my children are free.”

Taiga presses a fist to his mouth, then holds up one finger before pressing his fist back to his lips in silence. “All of your children are free,” he repeats, with his fist still pressed against his mouth. “All of them?”

Coyote cocks his head in the other direction. “Why shouldn’t my children be free?”

Taiga opens his mouth and then closes his eyes with a sigh. Any answer he gives will either be offensive, or incomprehensible, or both to Coyote. Resting his elbow on the coffee table, and then his chin on his palm, he studies Coyote, who smiles beatifically for him. Or as beatifically as a being made of smoke but still with more teeth than one creature ever needed can smile. “Okay,” he says around his fingers, not bothering to lift his chin off his palm. “All of your children are free—which, I would like to point out, leaves me with a whole bunch of new questions but we’ll hold onto those—and just, what, running about the place?”

Coyote laughs until his form dissipates into nothing but a writhing mass of smoke with two red eyes blinking out of it. “You sound so distressed, atsili!”

“Given the current situation,” Taiga snaps. “I think I have a reason.”

“And what is the current situation?” Coyote asks as the smoke slides into the form of a coyote again—or at least the loose outlines of one. 

Taiga frowns slightly. Lifting his chin from his palm he asks, “Do I need to smudge you some more smoke or something? You look like you’re, uh.”

“I have as much or as little to hold my form as I find necessary,” comes the dismissive answer. “You are delaying, atsili.”

Taiga blinks and then sighs as he rakes his hands through his hair, not caring if that makes it stick up everywhere. “I think one of your obsidian-eyed men has attached itself to Kuroko.”

“So you have mentioned,” Coyote replies, the smoke settling more firmly into his form, shading in the suggestion of fur. “And it is your desire that I do precisely what?”

Taiga resists the urge to draw his knees to his chest like an upset toddler. “I don’t think there is anything that you can do,” he responds and then rushes to modify his statement, “even for one as powerful as yourself.”

Coyote snorts, which is kinda funny—Taiga has to admit, because it effectively blows off his little smoky snout. “Such flattery, when laid on as thick as uncut pemmican, turns quickly to insult.”

Taiga holds up his hands. “I was just trying to be clear that it wasn’t a problem of, like, power. But maybe knowledge?” Taiga pulls a face. “I don’t know what the fuck the thing actually is, or if it’s actually a problem, only that it’s weird and I don’t like it.”

“The list of things that you find distasteful because they are strange to your senses,” Coyote responds with what Taiga thinks is slightly aggrieved snippiness, “would be as numbered as the grasses on the plains.” 

“Fair, probably,” Taiga admits. “But still. So far all this obsidian-eyed man does, if it is one, is make Kuroko fade in and out of the Fourth World and talk a lot about shadows and lights.” He waves his hands around as if that will make things less unsettled. “I can’t even really tell what is just, you know, Kuroko-normal weird and what is obsidian-eyed-man-induced weird.” 

Sayoko’s tittering laugh distracts both of them before they can fall into an old pattern of Taiga complaining and Coyote teasing. She regards both of them with open amusement that make her eyes sparkle. It really is unfair, Taiga thinks, that she’s so pretty. “Is it usual, in the Americas, for gods to know their followers so well?”

“Taiga,” Coyote says before Taiga can even open his mouth to respond, “is a special situation, as you know.”

Sayoko cocks her head to the side. “Indeed? Ah well, regardless. I can tell you that your friend’s, ah, passenger? Carries with it the stench of corruption.”

Taiga makes a face and even Coyote looks thoughtful. Because, awesome, that was really a thing he needs, a corrupt shadow attached to one of his teammates. “I wasn’t sure. It _felt_ wrong, but … yeah. I just couldn’t be sure.” 

He thinks Coyote will tease him for that or at least chide him, but the elder god just regards him for so long that he starts to fidget. Eventually he sighs gustily, a little wind whistling through the narrow room. “You must find your surety,” Coyote says with uncommon seriousness. “As your soul and heart seek to guide you, you must learn to listen.”

Coyote’s soft seriousness—his subdued affect that would, on any other creature, make Taiga think is worry—reminds him uncomfortably of the first time he had dreamed of Coyote in Japan. Coyote had been as soft and quiet and worried then, sitting in the vast golden memory-desert as he is now, sitting small and dainty on Taiga’s Ikea-bought couch. Taiga doesn’t really know how to deal with idea of Coyote’s worry and they both sit staring at each other awkwardly until Sayoko makes a thoughtful sound. 

“I have a wonder,” she announces as if Coyote and Taiga weren’t trying to awkward themselves into never being able to talk to each other again (well, maybe that’s just Taiga), with a finger pressed to her lips she studies the two of them. “Do these obsidian-eyed men often ride mortal vessels?”

Taiga blinks and then racks his memory for some clue. “Not from any of the stories that I know.”

“My children are content in the lands in which they dwell. It is only men who are never satisfied and restlessly move place to place,” Coyote says with infinite neutrality. When Sayoko nods with such serious agreement, Taiga feels slightly aggrieved and yet can’t find something to argue with. 

Sayoko’s smile is as smug as fox with a fat hen. “I do believe we have a nice little clue now, don’t we?”

Taiga frowns at the pair of them. “How is that a clue? Just because we have one weird obsidian-eyed man doesn’t mean that he’s corrupted.”

Coyote sighs deeply. “I forget how young you are. My children do not yearn. They do not strive. This is why they are both charming and yet boring. Men struggle against everything. It is both endearing and frustrating. For one of my children to yearn like men do is … unusual. Why it is yearning? Why has it left its companions? These are the questions which you must answer, atsili.”

“Why do I have to be the one to do this?” Taiga protests, though he knows it’s in vain. 

Both Coyote and Sayoko regard him with identical expression of fond patience—as if he’s a toddler having a temper tantrum.

“Right, never mind. Don’t know why I asked,” he says with a sigh.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Lys ap Adin for beta reading this and helping me plot through this monster of a fic.
> 
> Navajo words:  
> atsilì - younger brother  
> ánaaì - elder brother  
> ts'ah - white sage, specifically sage dried and prepared for ritual use  
> Áłtsé Hashké - The first/great Warrior (or Scolder, accent depending), one of the names for Coyote  
> Sasuke Inari Shrine - a shrine dedicated to the goddess Inari in Kanagawa. Myoubu are kitsune dedicated to Inari and generally considered to be relatively benevolent towards humans.


End file.
